Subject: Re: PageSize Backend and some changes to PageSize front end.
From: Dom Lachowicz (cinamod@hotmail.com)
Date: Sat Feb 03 2001 - 19:04:10 CST
>On Sat, Feb 03, 2001 at 07:20:48PM -0500, Leonard Rosenthol wrote:
> > At 9:10 AM +1100 2/3/01, Martin Sevior wrote:
> > >On Fri, 2 Feb 2001, Leonard Rosenthol wrote:
> > >
> > > > Not in the header, BUT for each page since we do NOT want to
> > > > preclude the (future?) ability to have different pages with
>different
> > > > sizes/orientations.
> > >
> > >We currently do not write out per page information.
> >
> > I know...I complained about that already for my other
> > abi-related project.
> >
>
>I agree that writing out page size info on a per-section basis is a
>good idea. But how exactly would you propose to implement per-page
>info? The number of pages, and the location of specific elements
>relative to those pages, is not known to the file format. How, then,
>would you store the info that "page 5 is landscape" if we don't even
>know where page 5 starts, or even if there's a page 5?
I don't think that it is feasible to accomplish this in any word processor.
IIRC, MSWord doesn't even do it. I think that the problem comes from a
difference in world-views.
All that Word Processors see are documents, and these documents can be
dynamically altered by users. These documents might also look differently on
different machines because the user might possibly have different fonts
installed, (or different versions of MSWord) for example. A good WP (and its
file format) tries to minimize this effect as much as possible. Documents
are not collections of pages - pages are what "happen" at certain points in
a document. The model that we (and Word) use is something like the
following:
document -> section+ -> paragraph* -> mutable character & object data
However, things like PS and PDF are by nature page-based. You send one page
at a time to the printer, or view one page at a time using Ghostscript or
Adobe Reader. Pages are separate entites. Font metrics are stored in the
document for lossless display on any platform. Pages don't get edited - they
are generated by some other method (usually a document-based WP or such) and
remain static.
document -> page* -> immutable character & object data
The two try to accomplish separate goals. IMHO, this should either be a
per-document attribute or a per-section attribute. How often do you find
yourself switching between landscape and portrait mode every other page?
Dom
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