XSL companion, The

Lines

When text is flowed into a block, it occupies one or more lines within that block. Blocks may therefore contain line areas, which are adjacent to each other in the line-progression direction (vertically, working down the block, in English documents).

The number of line areas that are needed depends on how much text can be placed on each line. This will depend on the font chosen, and the size chosen to display characters in this font (such as 9pt Times Roman, or 12pt Helvetica). A major task of the XSL formatting engine is deciding how to arrange text over multiple lines (as well as how much material to place on each page). There is therefore no element to represent a single line, as the document author would not know how much text to place ...