Sosofos: Formatting Specifications

On the last page you learned the idea of construction-rules.
You noticed that a construction-rule contains generally formatting specifications.
These formatting specifications are called sosofos

Methods

Several sosofos are introduced:

(make simple-page-sequence)
Before you write a document with a word-processor   you have to generate an empty page.
In DSSSL you first have to generate an empty page, too.
So a simple-page-sequence should be applied to the root element.
An empty page of an word processing program has similar characteristics as the simple-page-sequence:
      width and heigth, header and footer, font-size, etc.
The content of this empty page is the result of processing the child-elements and data. E.g. The children of COOKBOOK are CTITLE and RECIPE. So the content of the empty page are the cookbook title and the recipe.

(make paragraph)
You generate a paragraph, if the text shall have special characteristics, e.g. font-size.
The paragraph contains the result of processing, its child-elements and data.
E.g. the paragraph which is specified by CTITLE contains its data "The Cookbook".

More characteristics of simple-page-sequence and paragraph you will find in this stylesheet.

Text-Sosofo: (literal string)
If you want to generate text which is not contained in the SGML-document, you use the method literal.
The sosofo (literal string) generates the text string.

Delete Data: (empty-sosofo)
If you want delete the content of an element, you apply an empty-sosofo on that element. Then nothing is returned to the output.


Example

Several sosofos are applied to the element CTITLE. You see the results for the same SGML-document processed with different stylesheets.

You need a java-enabled browser!!!


Stylesheets


Problems

The examples apply just simple sosofos on the elements.
If you want to get more sophisticated results   like numbered lists or tables-of-contents,
you first have to understand the data structures of DSSSL: Grove and Flow-Object-Tree.


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