docbook-apps

Dear folks,

I faced an issue with hyphenation in table cells. We automatically export strings from a database, that cannot be matched by the FOP hyphenation. I use the precompiled JAR made available through OFFO.

The strings in the table cells are kind of: "vvvvv_xxxxx_yyyyyy_zzzzz" with underscores between the substrings and the substrings being of variable length. The problem occurs, that long strings will not break at the cell border and bleed into the next cell.

Of course I could use soft hyphens manually, but this is only a work around as the database export of the strings should be done automatically.

Is there any docbook attribute or PI, that I could use? Or is it probably best to add a special hyphenation pattern? If so, has anyone of you done this once for FOP? I know that this is maybe not the best list for this. But if anyone had a solution here, why not asking also this list?

best regards,
Benjamin

Hi Benjamin,
The DocBook FO stylesheet has a feature for inserting soft hyphens in
long URLs for links, as described here:

http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/Ulinks.html#BreakLongUrls

This would have to be adapted through a customization layer to apply to
certain strings in table cells. The customization would call the
template named 'hyphenate-url' with a param named 'url' that contains
the string you want to hyphenate. It returns the string with the soft
hyphens (or zero-width spaces) inserted after the characters you
designate in the stylesheet param 'ulink.hyphenate.chars', which would
include underscore in your case. The template's usage is shown in
fo/xref.xsl in the templates matching on and <ulink>.

Bob Stayton
Sagehill Enterprises
bobs@sagehill.net

On 5/21/2015 1:08 AM, Kallauch, Benjamin (EEIN) wrote:
> Dear folks,
> I faced an issue with hyphenation in table cells. We automatically
> export strings from a database, that cannot be matched by the FOP
> hyphenation. I use the precompiled JAR made available through OFFO.
> The strings in the table cells are kind of: “vvvvv_xxxxx_yyyyyy_zzzzz”
> with underscores between the substrings and the substrings being of
> variable length. The problem occurs, that long strings will not break at
> the cell border and bleed into the next cell.
> Of course I could use soft hyphens manually, but this is only a work
> around as the database export of the strings should be done automatically.
> Is there any docbook attribute or PI, that I could use? Or is it
> probably best to add a special hyphenation pattern? If so, has anyone of
> you done this once for FOP? I know that this is maybe not the best list
> for this. But if anyone had a solution here, why not asking also this list?
> best regards,
> Benjamin