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The "Ideal" solution would be to take advantage of the font charactoristics of the device, plug that into the processr and have it used to word wrap at a pixel width. (for reference I'm refering to 'legacy' Palm, PPC and blackberry devices using the system font). But if thats too hard, even coming close with a charactor-count width would work but wouldnt produce as good results. In particular I'm not sure how to do the tables at all with character-count instead of using the font metrics. In another part of the product we solve this part by forcing tables into a fixed width font. I'm not sure that the piece of code I need to shove this data supports fixed width intermixed with variable width. David A. Lee dlee@c... http://www.calldei.com http://www.xmlsh.org 812-482-5224 Mike Sokolov wrote: > That's an interesting problem: I'm confused about the wrapping > requirement though. Do you need to wrap at a given number of > characters (sounded like 40?) or a pixel (or inch) width? Your > comment about the variable-width font makes it sound like you are > printing or displaying on screen with a particular font. It's > obviously much simpler if you don't have to worry about fonts, > variable character widths, vagaries of printer drivers and the like. > > -Mike > > David A. Lee wrote: >> I have a project where I need to take XML and format it as ascii text. >> Sounds simple right ? But alas the requirements are subtle. It seems >> people dont do text formatting much anymore. >> I fondly remember the days of nroff where I could do good text >> formatting and achieve things like word splitting (hyphenating), >> justification etc on text content. In particular a challenge is to >> support multi column tables. Thats right, text spanning 5 columns, >> that needs to wrap in each column. Oh and do that with 40 column >> line widths. Piece of cake. >> Oh and its a Variable width text font ... ha ! >> >> What I tried so far which almost works sorta, just enough to not work >> well enough :) >> Translate the XML to HTML with XSLT then I downloaded one of the free >> "HTML to Text" tools which are prevalent on the net. >> It sorta did work, except for the tables. But I need something that >> can work in a production environment. Open Source is prefered, >> but if it does an excellent job then a commercial product could be >> justified (pun intended). >> >> My next attempt will to try Apache FOP. I looked at RenderX but >> they dont claim text output. >> Apache FOP claims a text output but with caveots, the claim is its >> not robust code with poor results. >> Maybe they are being kind and it really works great. I will try. >> >> Any other suggestions ? I can always 'roll my own' but this project >> is not on the budget yet and were trying to see if we can do >> something with minimal work. >> Appreciated, >> >> thanks, >> >> >> >> > > _______________________________________________________________________ > > XML-DEV is a publicly archived, unmoderated list hosted by OASIS > to support XML implementation and development. To minimize > spam in the archives, you must subscribe before posting. > > [Un]Subscribe/change address: http://www.oasis-open.org/mlmanage/ > Or unsubscribe: xml-dev-unsubscribe@l... > subscribe: xml-dev-subscribe@l... > List archive: http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ > List Guidelines: http://www.oasis-open.org/maillists/guidelines.php
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