On 28 Jan 2011, at 17:05, Rob Sargent wrote:

Hi Rob

> The "distribute" attribute definitely improves the output, but indeed
> there are situations in which it fails to align the columns.

> I'm not a stranger to space-before but I didn't know about the
> sub-attributes.  I'll give those a try, but it will likely be some time
> next week before I can report my findings. The distribute attribute
> apparently adjusts leading between lines within paragraphs.  Would it be
> correct to assume using space-before.* would shift whole blocks?.

Yes. 

Vincent is correct btw, in that the dependency on a proprietary extension 
should be avoided as much as possible, especially given that it is undocumented.
Nevertheless, the described alternative does have the downside that it will do 
no good if a block is big enough. If there is no more room to fit the next 
header into the same column with the minimum space-before, elastic space-before 
or space-after will not solve the issue. You will be left with an 'underfull' 
column. The line-spacing within a paragraph will still remain the same 
throughout the document.
The standard alternative would be to specify 'line-height' in a similar manner. 
The property accepts values similar to space-*, so in theory you could do:

<fo:block line-height.minimum="1.2em" line-height.maximum="1.6em">

which would allow the formatter to choose the optimal line-height somewhere in 
between 1.2 and 1.6em.

I was not sure whether FOP supported it, but I just tried it with a smaller 
test document, and it did seem to have some effect, so you might want to look 
into that as well.


HTH!

Regards,

Andreas
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