xml - How to force wrap on table entries

Question

I'm having an issue where when I publish my modspecs to pdf (XSL-FO). My tables are having issues, where the content of a cell will overflow its column into the next one. How do I force a break on the text so that a new line is created instead?

I can't manually insert zero-space characters since the table entries are programmatically entered. I'm looking for a simple solution that I can just simply add to docbook_pdf.xsl (either as a xsl:param or xsl:attribute)

EDIT: Here is where I'm at currently:

<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="2.0" xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format">
<xsl:import href="urn:docbkx:stylesheet"/>
...(the beginning of my stylesheet for pdf generation, e.g. header and footer content stuff)
<xsl:template match="text()">
    <xsl:call-template name="intersperse-with-zero-spaces">
        <xsl:with-param name="str" select="."/>
    </xsl:call-template>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template name="intersperse-with-zero-spaces">
    <xsl:param name="str"/>
    <xsl:variable name="spacechars">
        &#x9;&#xA;
        &#x2000;&#x2001;&#x2002;&#x2003;&#x2004;&#x2005;
        &#x2006;&#x2007;&#x2008;&#x2009;&#x200A;&#x200B;
    </xsl:variable>

    <xsl:if test="string-length($str) &gt; 0">
        <xsl:variable name="c1" select="substring($str, 1, 1)"/>
        <xsl:variable name="c2" select="substring($str, 2, 1)"/>

        <xsl:value-of select="$c1"/>
        <xsl:if test="$c2 != '' and
            not(contains($spacechars, $c1) or
            contains($spacechars, $c2))">
            <xsl:text>&#x200B;</xsl:text>
        </xsl:if>

        <xsl:call-template name="intersperse-with-zero-spaces">
            <xsl:with-param name="str" select="substring($str, 2)"/>
        </xsl:call-template>
    </xsl:if>
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

With this, the long words are successfully broken up in the table cells! Unfortunately, the side effect is that normal text elsewhere (like in a under sextion X) now breaks up words so that they appear on seperate lines. Is there a way to isolate the above process to just tables?

Answer 1

In the long words, try inserting a zero-width space character between the characters where a break is allowed.

• You can use XSLT to insert a zero-width space between every character. Here is one way to do it: http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/XSL-FO/conversations/topics/1177.

• Here is a mailing list thread where various approaches to the problem are discussed: http://www.stylusstudio.com/xsllist/200201/post80920.html.

• The SourceForge DocBook stylesheets includes a template for breaking up long URLs in FO output; see http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/Ulinks.html#BreakLongUrls. The template (hyphenate-url) is in xref.xsl.