hi, i have a system that generates xml which i am then styling with css. i'm attempting to use php to run prince (so far unsuccessful, but i know it works on the server through Terminal), i have a foreach loop generating an ordered list, and my question is this: what does prince recognize as a link and how can i make sure it puts that link into the pdf? for example, my foreach loop looks for <formName></formName> and puts the values stored inside that tag inside an ordered list. how then do i link from the ordered list to the actual <formName>? i've tried adding <formName id='item1'> then <a href="#item1">Item 1</a> to the ordered list's <li>

If you're using HTML then that should work fine, if it's an arbitrary XML document and you want to include bits of XHTML then you'll have to place the <a> element in the XHTML namespace, or use XLink, or use the prince-link property (see the default xhtml.css file in the Prince installation for an example of how to do this).

thanks for the reply, could you be a little more specific in examples? it is an arbitrary xml document, and do you mean including the <a> element like this:

<a name="item1"><formId>Form A</formId></a>

cause that didn't work...

and i found the prince-link property within the xhtml css and read the page you referenced, but i still don't understand how it works.

If you look in xhtml.css or xhtml-ns.css you will see the following rule:

a[href] {
    ...
    prince-link: attr(href)
}

This turns <a href="URL"> elements into a link that points at URL. The reason why this isn't automatically working for you is that your document is arbitrary XML, not HTML, so only the xhtml-ns.css default style sheet will be applied. This has the same style rules, but only applies them to elements that are explicitly using the XHTML namespace, so that non-HTML elements are not incorrectly styled. (For example, an XML document might be using <table> to refer to furniture of some kind). If you place your link element in the XHTML namespace, it should work:

<a xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" href="URL">

If you don't want to deal with XML namespaces, then you can just add your own style sheet with a prince-link rule similar to the one listed above, and it should also work.