Xinha Discussion Forum

Chuck

Xinha Community Member

Registered: 2005-02-25

Posts: 29

Page breaks

I've searched a bit around the plugins directory and the forum but I couldn't find anything like that. Is there a pre-built plugin to enable the users to add "page breaks" into the html markup which could be interpreted upon render.

I could use some simple stuff like [pagebreak] the user would manually type in the markup but, before doing so, I wished to ask you all if you had any ideas about how to do such things.

P.S. The breaks won't be computed using text lenght etc. they're "logic breaks" the users wishes to add at specific places

Thanks alot !

willeffects

Xinha Authority

Registered: 2005-03-19

Posts: 130

Re: Page breaks

you could easily do this by putting in a tag such as "<pagebreak>" then have your processing language like PHP read it and output the data in the different pages.  I just used multiple editors because we found it would be more likely for users to use it vs decide to break a page...

Chuck

Xinha Community Member

Registered: 2005-02-25

Posts: 29

Re: Page breaks

Well, in the end, the most user friendly solution we found here was to "sacrife" the <hr> tag which we did not use anyway in that site. Changed it's look to a dashed red line and changed the tooltip to "Page break" instead of "horizontal ruler". Now, they can manipulate their page breaks easily and I just parse all my pages to break them on these <hr>

Hope this helps someone, some day :-P

kimss

Xinha Pro

From: Sweden

Registered: 2005-04-05

Posts: 99

Website

Re: Page breaks

Well infact you could use whatever you like, aslong as you search for a <hr> you might aswell search for a <img src="pagebreak.gif" class="pagebreak" width="100%" height="3px"> for example. I have played with the idea in my head from time to time and Im still stuck at the problems arrising if the pagebreak is entered in a table. Sure the user isnt supposed to do that, but as we all know the typical user doesnt know that.

As a practical problem you could have the main HTML design of the editable page like this in pseudo code :

<table width=100%>
  <td width="80%>
    A lot of text
    <hr>
    A lot of text
    <hr>
    A lot of text
  </td><td width=20%>
    A lot of thumbnails...
  </td>
</table>

This design would make alot of sense if the user has coloumns in the design, however the pagebreak wouldnt work very well here unless we do some smart parsing and rebuilding of alot of tags. Dont know if you have done the integration this way or if you just to a typical "explode('<hr>',$body);" and output pages for each item in the array.

Mvh,
Kim Steinhaug
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
www.steinhaug.no - www.easywebshop.no - www.easycms.no

Last edited by kimss (2006-02-27 19:23:25)

Chuck

Xinha Community Member

Registered: 2005-02-25

Posts: 29

Re: Page breaks

Nah... that kind of scenario wasn't taken care of. We have a very limited userbase so we can easily control this kind of situation verbally instead of coding complex algorithms to handle them.

Someday we might code a dynamic form in which we could add "pages" (displaying multiple instances of xinha). That would be much simpler on the user but i'm not sure about the weight of such a solution on the client side xinha being already a bit of the heavy side of memory usage. Anyways, I'm just pitching ideas here, the problem being already resolved in this project.