Re: [lmi] PDF pagination

[Greg Chicares]

On 2018-02-19 22:11, Greg Chicares wrote:
> On 2018-02-19 12:50, Vadim Zeitlin wrote:
[...]
> I haven't analyzed this exhaustively, but I have an impression
> that the footer might already be the same for all pages in any
> illustration, so that, e.g., perhaps the existing 'nasd_footer*'
> templates could be used for all pages in an mce_nasd PDF.

It seems that, for each ledger type, the same footer is already
used on every page, with the sole exception of a cover page that
has no footer at all.

Today, footers show some accidental variation across ledger types,
but we have the liberty to design a universal footer that includes
all the information on all footers, and then use that universal
footer for all ledger types. That means we can have fewer
'*footer*.mst' files. For example, these two:
  reg_d_group_footer_lower.mst
  reg_d_indiv_footer_lower.mst
are almost identical; the 'group' one contains 'date_prepared',
which the 'indiv' one lacks; the order of the items doesn't matter
much; and we could therefore use the 'group' one for both. But,
instead of making that one particular change now, we should work
out a single universal footer that works for all ledger types;
and we don't want to design that until we've finished testing
the current implementation.

>>  This is obviously rather heavy and inconvenient, but I just don't see what
>> else can we do. If the headers were the same for all the pages, we might be
>> able to use some <fixed_end/> pseudo-tag in the template and then split the
>> single file into parts before and after this tag (although I'm not sure how
>> to do it with wxHTML right now), but if the header needs to vary, even this
>> wouldn't be enough.
> 
> Okay, tomorrow I'll ask whether we can make these headers and footers
> invariant across ledger types.

Footers are mentioned above. Headers do vary across ledger types, but
they can be made the same for all pages in each ledger type. E.g.,
the 'nasd' headers are already the same (on all pages except the
headerless cover page), with exceptions that we can eliminate:

'nasd_header.mst':
    The header is split in two parts, upper and lower one, only to allow
    inserting the title between them, as a couple of pages do. But we still
    provide this "full header" template for the pages that don't have any
    title to make them simpler.

The title that's inserted in between can be moved after the header,
which then won't need to be split in two parts.

Thus, addressing your question quoted above:
  "... If the headers were the same for all the pages ..."
we'll work to make them the same for all pages (though they'll still
differ by ledger type). We won't do that now: it's better to test
everything thoroughly first, before changing such details. But, given
the goal of redesigning the layouts to increase uniformity, we'll try
to avoid introducing new header or footer irregularities as we add
pagination for all-text pages.