> One bit of content we are planning on disseminating via a CMS has an unusual > restriction: the pagination must be preserved. > > These are documents that ultimately need to be searchable, viewable, > parsable, but also retain a specic pagination scheme for proper citations. > For instance, the document, itself, may cite another page of the document, > and other documents need to cite specific pages of other documents. > > The easy solution is to just publish them as PDFs, but that just doesn't > seem to be the elegant solution in my mind. Is there way to store structured > content in a way that also retains the page structure of the original typed > paper document? Or would PDF be the way to go?
This be a tricky problem, working on a cms based on XML/XSLT I've given a lot thought. There actually atleast two problems as I see it, pagination and referal. First off, pagination. Infering a page structure in the content might not be the best way since it often has more to do with the visual presentation of the content rather than the structure. Sure you could argue that a book is structured in pages but what if you were to print that book in a different format, then the page structure would be useless. I think pagination is something that has to be infered automatically upon presentation, a article showed in the display of a mobile phone in WML needs to be paginated differently than for a webbrowser for instance. Now on to referal. I had this problem when I wanted people to be able to comment passages in XML documents, but how to do it? You can't just use word positions, what happens if the document is edited. The best solution and simplest solution I came up with was to simply insert insert comment markers or the entire comments directly into the document, this way you can refer to a portion easily and it can be maintained when modified. The comments or comment markers can easily be filtered out if you want to present the document clearly in some context. There are some problems with this approach however, first you can't refer to any section arbitrarily, such as 'paragraph 3, page 13'. Hopefully this is solved by using a referal method based upon structure rather than presentation, like 'chapter 13, section 6' or something like it. The other problem is that in order to maintain commentmarkers and comments with this method where the document can be edited and isn't static is that people need to be able to insert the markers into the document. In some cases this might not be a problem but take the case of the internet. Say that you publish an article and the whole internet populotion could insert markers, that could potentially bloat your document immensly, optimally here you would want each person to store the comment markers themselves but I haven't come up with a good way to do that and preserve their integrity whent the document is edited, any suggestions welcom, maybe I'm overlooking something :) best regards ---- Mattias Konradsson -- http://cms-list.org/ trim your replies for good karma.
