XSLfast 4.0 - Using page kinds - how to handle single page output

First of all congratulations on the new XSLfast 4.0, it is a major step forward

And including FOP 0.95 doesn't make it worse

When using page-kinds - which in XSL-FO language is page-positions for conditional-page-master-references - I'm missing the possibility to handle a situation in a single layout, where the output can consists of 1...n pages. On the first page and the last page I want then top and bottom regions to be different from each other. If there is only a single page output, it should be a mix of the first and last page.

I know that FOP 0.95 included a feature from XSL 1.1 - the page-position named "only" which is defined here:

http://www.w3.org/TR/xsl11/#page-position (7.27.14 page-position)

This handles exactly what I'm missing. Are there any another solution?

Next it could be really nice to make page-kinds dependent on the XML-source. Then one could design multiple variants of the last page, or include different trailing pages each one selected upon different XML-source.

As the possibilities are right know, and as it could be with the suggestions above, the layout could start to include a lot of redundancy, as each of the page-kinds define both the top and bottom of the layout, several page-kinds could end up being designed identical. Yes you are right, I could utilize callable templates, but it moves the layout away from WYSIWYG. I suggest that a region on a page-kind could just be a reference to another page-kind region, and display'ed either grey or as a grey shadowed variant.

Kind regards,
Michael Reiche

This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 31/08/2009 15:23:41

We're sorry but XSLfast 4.0 has no support for this region type.

We will check, if we can add this option in one of the next minor releases.

I have created a ticket for your requirement:
http://jira.jcatalog.com/browse/XSL-1533

In the meantime, multi layouts provide an alternative in some situations.
You could define a different layout for the last page in a multi layout.
However, we see that this not the general solution.