Hello all:
I have been madly reviewing both the XSL-FO and FOP boards for an answer to the following question:
How do I determine the amount of pages, in a document and the current page I am on. I think I may have to write an extension to determine this. Here is why I need this information:
I am dealing with creating a document which is to be fed into a machine which utilizes optical mark recognition (OMR) technology. Basically it looks like a bar code in the top right hand corner of the page, this "bar code", or series of hash marks is different for every page in the document and appears on each page. The document is fed into the machine, and based on these "lines" the machine knows how many pages to grab and fold.
Now that we know the problem, the kicker is: The bar codes change depending on how many pages are in the document. For example: If I have a 5 page document, it will have "blah" set of bar codes for each page. Every five page document shares the same "blah" bar codes. But a 5 page document's bar codes are completely different from a document which is 7 pages long. This is why I need to know how may pages are in the document I am rendering. If I have that I can dynamically assign the appropriate "region-before" to the document.
Has someone come across this before, and how did you solve it (Oleg I know you posted something about this, a while back and Ken answered your question, but you situation I think was slightly different)? If no-on has, the only way I can see for doing this is to create an extension into FOP which can some how extend inserting an external graphic, while utilizing the functionality of page-number-citation. I began looking through PageNumberCitation.java and was confused by some stuff I found. Either way, I was wondering is there somewhere a real good document on how to create an extension. I have examined the SVG, and the mathML extensions, and am still a little lost.
Sorry for the long windedness of the email
Rob
