A few. I do think, when proposing these things, it is important to remember that XSL-FO is not intended to implement all possible typsetting operations, that it still needs to remain "easily" implementable.
I guess one question I have is how different should XSL-FO 2.0 be from 1.1? Should it just be some minor changes/fixes, or are they considering some pretty substantial changes? Because if it is the latter, I've got some suggestions with that regard: * Eliminate entirely the notion of unbounded page lengths/viewports. That is, browser-like viewing with scrollbars and such. This, among other things, has the effect of making the viewport stuff unnecessary and substantially clarifies the specification and any descriptions thereof. The primary purpose of XSL-FO is for paged media; we already have tools for unpaged media. * Seriously reconsider having block-level elements and inline elements be interleaved. It probably makes FO processor implementation a bit more difficult. Plus, it's just needless; you can easily wrap that inline stuff in a block. * Page specification (simple-page-master) could be made so much more intuitive. It is far too easy to put a header in the middle of your content by accident, and while I support that functionality, it should not be the default. If it's just minor changes: * Allow for lists that periodically reverse the left/right (IPD, technically) positioning of the blocks. Generally, to allow for lists that alternate one after another which side the content and which side the list item is on. It would, also, be useful to alter other attributes when doing this. There is a FO-processor that has an extension to do it, but I forget its name. This alternation would likewise be reset at every page/region break. * In that same vein, similar alternation patters for table row properties that reset at page/region breaks. This would allow for alternate color backgrounds, but that always start (wherever they are visible) on a particular boundary. * FO 1.1 added the ability to have multiple body regions on a page, and a flow map to dictate how data flows from one to another. What was not added were appropriate keeps/breaks to deal with the possibility of switching to a new region without leaving the page itself. This distinction should be made. * The ability to specify 2-up/4-up/etc style page generation. This cannot be done even with FO 1.1's multiple body regions, because one lacks the ability to have multiple static content regions on a page, as well as where those regions get placed. Something like a "multiple-page-master" that physically shrinks several simple-page-masters onto a single page. * Footnote numbering/indexing per page or region, rather than leaving it up to the FO document. The "numbering", of course, needs to be flexible and user-definable (perhaps as a sequence of character possibilities that is referenced). * Meta-data needs to be handled in some way. A section, perhaps just after the page master section, would be ideal. * Please give us a RELAX NG+Schematron schema for XSL-FO. It would be so incredibly useful to have such a thing. -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/XSL-FO-2.0-workshop-in-Heidelberg-next-week-tf2408511.html#a6727041 Sent from the FOP - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
