Pagebreaks and DITA

[pmoan]

Hello-

We're using XMetal 5.5 and the DITA OT to author content and render publications in PDF.  My question pertains to page breaks.  There are cases where we need a figure (and the corresponding figure title) to appear at the top of a page- hence the need for a “pagebreak”. 

Has anyone else come across this need? If so, how did you handle it?

Thanks in advance for any insight.

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[Chris]

Hi Pmoan,

Two ways come to mind for handling arbitrary page breaks:

1. Insert processing instructions (PIs) into your XML, and implement PI processing like the DocBook XSL library:
http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/PageBreaking.html#HardPageBreaks

2. Add an outputclass attribute to the figures that need a page break before them, and write an XSL template to catch these cases.

I've had decent luck with method #2.

HTH,

– Chris

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[pmoan]

Thanks much Chris.  This is in line with what I thought we might have to do – namely use otherprops and modify the XSLT to generate pagebreaks when the case is processed.

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[mzwecker]

I would think this solution would be a problem if you are localizing your output.  The solution you are suggesting would “hard code” some page breaks? No?

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[pmoan]

Thanks for your note. 

When you say “localizing” are you referring to displaying content in multiple languages?  Content is displayed in English only.   

In general we'd be putting page breaks in front of a specific set of figures that should always appear on their own page. 

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[mzwecker]

Hi,
Yes, I mean if you are delivering your output in multiple languages.  For anyone working in EN only this solution sounds good to me.  But with translated content sometimes there is expansion (or contraction), so a page break that works in EN may not work in another language.  Just something to consider in case you would ever be delivering to other languages.

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[mmoulder]

I have this issue where we do localize into 28 languages, so it is hard to hard code the page breaks and make them happen on the image as suggested. This is really bad for example in our What's New section where we have Text then a screenshot of our new feature. We often have the text on 1 page then the screenshot on the other, which really sucks.

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[mmoulder]

Sorry I guess our is a little different where want the text and the image to appear together without a page break.

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