Running header with nested generated content

Question

This is a question about Paged Media. I want to mix a string-set with running elements. It works in PrinceXML but not in PDFReactor. My question, is this possible in PDFReactor?

HTML

<p class="head">
    <span class="first">Repeatable title</span>
    <span class="divider">|</span>
    <span class="last"></span>
</p>

CSS

p.head {
    position: running(heading);
    font-size: 8pt;
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;
}

@page {
    size: A4;

    @top-left {
        content: element(heading);
    }
}

So far everything is peachy. But when I try to define a string-set from a H1 and try to write this into span.last this isn't working.

h1 {
    string-set: doctitle content();
}

p.head span.last {
    content: string(doctitle);
}

Answer 1

This is possible with PDFreactor as well. Just the syntax is a bit different. PDFreactor does not support the content() function for the string-set property with Named Strings. Instead it uses the self value which works like content() or content(text) (see http://www.pdfreactor.com/product/doc_html/index.html#NamedStrings )

There is a second issue. You are setting the content property on the span element itself. Usually in CSS, creating generated content with the content property is actually only allowed for page margin boxes and pseudo elements such as ::before and ::after. This is also how browsers support it. Not sure why this works in Prince.

So basically you just have to make 2 minor adjustments to your style sheet to make this work in PDFreactor:

h1 {
    string-set: doctitle self;
}

p.head span.last::before {
    content: string(doctitle);
}