Side Regions PDF Plugin

Side Regions PDF Customization

Developer: W. Eliot Kimber, [email protected]

Date: 7 June 2014

This PDF customization reworks the page masters to define side regions (region-start and region-end) for all the pages, replacing the base technique of using margins on the page.

The changes from the base layout masters approach is

1. Remove the left and right (start and end) margins from the page. This makes the entire physical extent of the page available for marks.

   If you specify margins on the page then you can't place anything in that area. It also requires you to then set left and right margins on the top and bottom (before and after) regions in order to make their content fit within the width of the body region.

2. Set the margins on the region-body equal to the page margins. This moves the edges of the region body in from the physical edge of the page so that it will not overlap the edge regions.

3. Define region-start and region-end on each page master. The regions' @extent values are set to the page margin value, making them as wide as the intended margin. This means they will be exactly adjacent to the left and right edges of the body region.

4. Set the background color on the edge regions to yellow to verify that they are actually being generated. In a real customization you probably wouldn't have yellow borders on your pages.

To adapt this to real use you can simply remove the background-color attributes from the fo:region-start and fo:region-end elements.

You can use edge regions for things like thumb tabs, chapter titles, icons used for navigation, etc. To use them you need to override the main chapter-creation template in order to add generation of static content for these new regions since the base PDF transform does not use side regions.