Hi folks I'm posting to -dev because I've hit a wall with FOP that I'm interested in paying someone to knock down.
For details on the issue, see the thread "Distributing vertical space in a column while repeating column headings" in -users, starting with message-id 4c1f97b7.9040...@postnewspapers.com.au . Archive thread begins here: http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/xmlgraphics-fop-users/201006.mbox/%3c4c1f97b7.9040...@postnewspapers.com.au%3e There are several possible approaches to solve the issue I'm having, but the simplest looks like implementing vertical justification of space within one-column tables, by respecting and applying elastic "space-before" on blocks within table cells in one-column tables. An alternative option would be to add conditional output to blocks, so that a certain block could be suppressed (or only shown) if it was the first object after a break. But I suspect that'd be a lot more complicated, and would require extensions to the standard, whereas vertical justification of elastic space within tables would not. OTOH, it'd be really handy. In the end, any method that'll let me repeat headings for sections of flowed listings when those sections are broken across columns on a multi-column page, AND vertically distribute space within those columns, would do. Right now, with fop I can do one or the other but not both. If you feel you know the layout engine well enough to tackle this, think it's something reasonable to do, and can do it well enough that your changes can be committed into fop trunk, I'd be interested to hear from you with an estimate of how much work it'd take you over how long, what approach you'd take, and how much you'd want to charge for the work. Be realistic about time/effort, not optimistic. The rights to any changes would be licensed under the same terms as fop its self, with copyright held by the author, and would want to seek inclusion of the changes into fop's trunk. In fact, that'd have to be condition of satisfactory completion, since I *really* don't want to be in the job of maintaining an external patch against complex core bits of fop! Anyone interested? -- Craig Ringer System and Network Administrator POST Newspapers
