hello,

we have been running into a serious issue, which threatens to derail our current project. We are working on a document with a three column layout. From time to time there will be a container (image or figure), which should span over two columns and take up all available height. Something similar to this:

div {
   float: column-top;
   height: 100%;
   column-span: 2;
}

With 'height: 100%' set, prince will drop all content following the div and output this error on the console:

prince: error: dropping unpackable block

If we remove the height attribute, everything works fine. Even if we set 'height: 99%', it works. It appears as if PrinceXML really needs some space below the 'column-span' container. Is there anything to make Prince accept content span over two columns and using 100% of the height?

I have attached a simple test case.

Greetings,
John

1. 3cols_colspan_2.html‎ 23.9 kB ‎
   Source file
2. 3cols_colspan_2.pdf‎ 28.9 kB ‎
   Produced PDF

Nobody is doing 3 columns layouts?

Sorry for the delay, we will investigate this issue as soon as possible.

Thanks Mike!

We are devising a fix for this issue, are you able to work around it with "height: 99%" in the meantime?

Hello Mike,

that's great news. "Height: 99%" is not working, as it will still put one line in the second column. However for now we inserted (transparent) dummy content, that pushes the correct content to the last column and so makes it work for the time being.

Can you estimate how long this fix will take you? And could you provide a binary with the fix so we can make it work for the final product?

I understand that that our current license would not cover this, but for now we would extend our desktop license, before moving on to a server/custom license.

Greetings,
John

Hopefully we will have a better idea of how long it will take within the next few days, it can be hard to tell in advance as it depends on what we unearth, but we are currently working on column floats anyway so I'm optimistic.

Thanks for the quick reply Mike. It would be great, if you could keep us up to date about the progress. And if there is anything to test, we are more than happy to contribute.

Hi,

We've now got a fix for this working on our development machines, and which also fixes the problem of a line being crammed in when the height is slightly less than 100%.

Mark

Hi Mark,

that's great news! Will you offer a "latest" release including this fix? Or is there any other way we could test/use this version?

Greetings,
John

Edited 13 Jun 2019 by John

Yes the latest build will be ready shortly.

That's really great news. Appreciate it! Thanks Mike, Mark and whoever was involved in the fix!

The latest builds are available now! Please let us know if you have any further issues with them.

(Mark is responsible for the fixes, he's doing amazing things with column floats recently!)

Thanks a lot Mark and Mike. We have just extended our support contract and will go test the new version right away. If everything goes well in the next two projects, we will further integrate Prince and move on to a server based solution. Looking forward to!

Greetings,
John

Out of curiosity, is this planned to be in another 12.x release? Or is this going to be in Prince 13? We have a DR customer running into this issue.

This will be in Prince 13, due to be released in November.