Erik-
I'm not a FO guru by any means, so please don't take my word as gospel, but I don't belive that there is a way to perform this two-up layout. This may be because the Formatting Objects specification is intentionally less ambitious than it could be in the first draft in order to give implementers a better chance of early conformance (and giving the authors a better chance of actually finnishing the thing).
As the specification stands I know you can have alternating page layouts, where left hand pages get a wide right margin, etc... but I don't know of any way that you can switch between flows at every page break.
It sounds like a simple compromise for you would be to use a column style layout implemented with a giant table, this won't give you a two-up layout but it may fulfill your other requirements: You construct a two column table. The subject paragraphs go into the left hand cell, and the descriptions go onto the right hand cell. You can use the keep-together.within-page="always" attribute of the right hand cell (actually the block contained within it) to make sure that you always have a full description on one page (unless it's longer than a page). Unfortunately, in the 0.17 version, FOP's keeps tend to work eposodically, but I think this may have been improoved on in more recent versions.
Here's an example of what this might look like:
<fo:table>
<fo:table-column column-width="3.5in"/>
<fo:table-column column-width="3.5in"/>
<fo:table-body>
<fo:table-row>
<fo:table-cell>
<fo:block>
This is the paragraph that will apprear on the left hand side
of the table.
</fo:block>
</fo:table-cell>
<fo:table-cell>
<fo:block keep-together.within-page="always">
This is the set of paragraphs that describe what's going on on
the left. This text will never be to the right of a paragraph
that it isn't describing.
</fo:block>
</fo:table-cell>
</fo:table-row>
<fo:table-row>
...
</fo:table-row>
</fo:table-body>
</fo:table>
I hope that I've helped. Best of luck!
-Joey
On 09 Jul 2001 07:40:25 +0200, Erik Rehrmann wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I have to know if it is possible to calculate the content of the
> left page in dependence on the contents of the right page.
>
> We have to print a book consisting of a paragraph-like left side
> content and a right side which describes the single paragraphs
> of the left side. The size of the description on the right side
> can have 3 lines up to 3 pages. And here is the problem: There
> must only as many paragraphs on the left side as can be described
> on the right side. If a description exceeds one page, the next
> left page has to be empty.
>
> Is this possible with FOP, maybe by render the right side counting
> the descriptive parts and then inserting the paragraph page
> before? If so, how has the XML file to look like?
