David, I'm copying this to plucker-dev, so that others get to see the
questions and answers.
> 1) I'm using <div align="justify">blah</div> tags to justify the text.
> Which works, but some reason, there are unexplained line (not para) breaks
> which occur at seemingly random places in the text. I've looked at the
> html, and can see nothing there that appears to be doing it. Also, if I
> change the font in the viewer preferences from standard to bold, the line
> breaks move -- i.e. they still occur, but in different places in the text.
> So I guess that one is a viewer issue, pretty much for sure. Have you
> encountered that one before? (A note on the html that I'm using -- I've
> taken all extraneous tags out -- font attributes, span, etc -- to have the
> html as clean as possible.) Also, as far as I've seen so far, the extra
> line breaks don't occur if I leave the text as left-justified.
Looking at this, I see that (1) this should work, and (2) there's some
legacy code in the HTML parser that isn't quite right, but shouldn't
affect this. The only thing I can think of is that you are seeing a
Plucker artificial paragraph break, but that should only happen in the
middle of really long paragraphs, longer than 3000 characters.
There's a tweak in the HTML parser that can be made to increase this
size, but there's some viewer problem with making it too big, I
believe -- though I don't remember the specifics, and whether the
problem only applies to text, and not to HTML.
> 2) The Section breaks -- are they a requirement of the parser, or the
> viewer? Will they be around forever? I'm guessing that it's possible to
> get around them by making Plucker documents from a set of html pages, such
> as I suppose was used in the creation of the Plucker manual, so that any
> given page is small enough to not warrant being broken up into sections by
> the parser (correct me if I'm wrong there)... but is it possible to force
> a section break by adding anything to the html? That would allow me to
> have each Chapter in a section of its own, without me having to create a
> whole set of html files. I'd like to avoid that if I can.
They're a requirement of the viewer, I guess you'd say. There's been
some discussion about how to remove them, and present the page as one
long scroll, even if it's broken into sections in the database. The
main technical problem seems to be how we can represent the scrollbar
correctly, if we do that; we won't have the total layout size of the
whole page, only of the current subsection (or two or three
subsections). But I'd sure like to get rid of them. Glad to get some
similar user feedback.
> 3) Re the display of paragraphs in the viewer ... Can the space before a
> paragraph, and also the first-line indentation of a paragraph, be affected
> by anything in the HTML? For example, by a style sheet? Or is it fixed?
Well, the space before a paragraph can't officially be affected by
anything, though you can use some not-guaranteed-to-keep-working
tricks in the input HTML to trick the parser into putting more space
before the para, such as <P><DT></DT> (each sequence of <DT></DT>
should give you a couple more pixels). Similarly, I'm not aware of
any paragraph indentation ability. But you can begin the paragraph
with a sequence of " " characters; about 5 gives you a reasonable
indent. We could add some attributes to the P directive, but that's a
bad path to go down. Better to support CSS styles, I think; that
would let you use the "text-indent" property to specify indentation.
David, are you interested in processing Open Ebook Publishing
Structure documents? I'm looking for an excuse to add an XML parser
supporting OEBPS to the Plucker parser. It sort of works right now,
but I'd like to be able to handle CSS.
> Overall, laying out a text for Plucker is real, real easy. You guys have
> come up with a great system here.
Thanks, but people like Mark, Holger, Michael, and Dirk deserve the
credit on this. They wrote the code.
Bill
