Joerg,
You have highlighted one of the nastinesses of page formatting. A Q&D
solution often suggested is to allow a fixed width for the page numbers,
but I don't see how this can stand as a final solution. The gaps are
going to be obvious in something purporting to be a high-quality
rendering system, and what if you don't allow for enough digits?
The spec allows a lot of local adjustment, so I think that in the vast
majority of cases local re-formatting will fix the problem, and keep the
adjustments within the page. However, I think also that spill effects
will have to be accommodated.
Convergence problems like your page 99 scenario occur in other contexts;
notably the "last page" problem. The last page in a sequence is allowed
a different page-master, but the only way to discover the last page is
to lay it out. Oops, last page. Lay it out again, using the
last-page-master. Oops, we now have something left over, so it's not
the last page any more. These cases will have to be catalogued as
discovered, and circuit-breaker heuristics provided for them.
Peter
Joerg Pietschmann wrote:
>"Nicola Ken Barozzi" wrote:
>
>>Anyway, these forward references are a pain in the ass :-/
>>
>
>Very true. Imagine the worst case: Someone puts a
> "(See page )"
>into the text at page 1. The formatter has to allocate some
>space for the unknown number, lets say a "n" space. The
>referenced block happens to end up on page 99. The
>preallocated space is not sufficient, extending this space
>could cause reformatting of all pages, which is already bad.
>Furthermore, the reformatting could push the referenced
>block to page 100, thereby providing another problem.
>
>I have no idea how an interface able to deal with the problem
>above could look like.
>
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