[pmwiki-users] GeneratePDF recipe limitation

John Rankin john.rankin at affinity.co.nz
Thu Sep 7 22:28:11 CDT 2006


On Friday, 8 September 2006 1:53 PM, Patrick R. Michaud <pmichaud at pobox.com> wrote:

>I'm also wanting to add a built-in "break page" markup to the recipe;
>just haven't figured out what that should be yet.  (What do PublishPDF
>and other similar recipes use?)
>
PublishPDF uses the following structural hierarchy:

...
section
  subsection
    subsubsection
      paragraph
        subparagraph

For typesetting a single page, we use the first 2 levels of wiki 
heading markup found on the page to define sections and subsections.

So if a page uses !! and !!!! as its first 2 headings, we treat 
those as sections and subsections. If another page has !!! as its
first heading, that becomes a section.

There is an option in the print metadata called sectionnewpage.
If this is 'on', every time we find a new section, we start a new
page. The reader can change this on demand, rather than it being
a fixed part of the document.

If that page is part of a published page collection, each page
becomes a section and the headings drop down a level. In a book,
there is a new top level tag called chapter, and these always
start a new page.

In other words, we use the structure of the document to control
the fall of new pages, rather than arbitrary 'break' instructions.
These are a bad idea, because they break when the content changes.
Since a particular wiki page can be printed as part of any number
of page collections, the idea of a fixed break point is not valid.

Since both tables and images 'float', we don't have to worry 
about where these fall in the resulting output.

I do not understand what problem "break page" markup is
intended to solve. It's deprecated practice in word processors 
and I don't see why it would be good practice here.

Something like (:break h2:) would be one possible approach, ie 
the author defines a rule that applies to the whole document.

-- 
JR
--
John Rankin







More information about the pmwiki-users mailing list