Oxygen XML Forum

Hello

I'm just trialling Oxygen as a replacement to Framemaker. I've got the css customised to look like our current output but I'm wondering how people manage pagination with dita to pdf? With large topics (half page or more) I can set page break after and that works quite well. But with small topics (a few lines) it starts to look daft with all the empty space. The break avoid isn't too smart and just prohibits a break, often causing text to overflow the page. With no breaks, it will just break a small.topic in half between pages which also looks daft. With framemaker, we get an intermediate framemaker output which we can adjust the pagination but obviosuly we can't do that if we go straight to pdf.

So how do others manage it?

For context, we have about 40 IFUs,.one map for each and a shared topic repository. All translated into about 15 languages too.

Thanks

Steve

Hi Steve, because you are using CSS based rendering, I cannot help you. With pure XSL:FO using the default PDF plugin of the DITA-OT you can adjust page breaks by adding and adjusting the keep-together attributes in the attribute sets. But please be aware that creating a PDF plugin is complex, and very time consuming. If you would like to do it, you should buy and read the book "DITA for Print". But it's worth it. We fully replaced FrameMaker as well.

Hi Steve,

We have an improvement to relax Oxygen PDF Chemistry page break algorithm to handle dynamic breaking besides always and avoid. Is that what you are looking for? I've added your vote to the improvement request so you will be notified when this will be available.

Regards,
Julien