Hi Chris,

At least for me, you've not provided enough details for me to attempt to look into providing an answer.

Hi Jonathan

I was hoping you would reply! I am getting more and more into a mess with this and some of the below may be completely wrong!

Am calling a xyperl routine from the ::before with a view to, depending on the value of number register 99, changing whether things are centered or range left - at hte moment everything ranges left no matter what I do. I am struggling with the explanations in the documentation!

The Xyperl is (in test most):

Chris

Chris,

Here is my solution to your problem.
This is the test division:

here is the CSS:

And here is the perl:

I have switched to the numeric argument for the text-align just because the built-in xpp:ta attribute (used in the cals_t5.css) is numeric
I will try soon to see if it works also as a string (which I think it should - but hey need to test first).

Also note that you have to escape the : in the css as it is a special character. So the xpp attribute should be called out as xpp\:

Another thing to note is that when you use your own xpp attribute  in the CSS you should always specify what kind of value it returns. Hence my attr(xpp\:fred integer);

Now testing with a string...

Thanks Bart - will test later this afternoon! I would never have though of the \ !!!

Nope string does not work.

No errors in the compose log as CSS silently ignores the text-align property (yes that is the way CSS works:-)

Kind of strange if you think about it. In a normal CSS you define something like: text-align: center; 
But when you ask something like text-align: attr(xpp\:fred string); that does not work. 

And I tried setting the xpp\:fred both to the CSS properties center (or right) and the tq macro values c (or r).

I guess that is a nice question for SDL engineering>
I can not come up with a sensible answer...

Believe me I have been bitten as well by the \: thing, but a look into the cals_t5.css shows you quickly how it needs to be done.

Chris,

And here is a tip when you post a question or a reply with an image in it.
After you did the insert image and you have upload your image, make sure you empty out the dimensions field before you hit OK.

Like that your image will have its true dimensions and not be reduced to the 320 x 240 pixels format

I think I just found another subject for my monthly article...thank you Chris

Thant was going to be my next message!

It is a very interesting subject.
I guess not many people understand why we need xpp attributes...