Created attachment 29172 [details] fo file triggering the bug I discovered this problem with the fop backend of xmlto when using it to create a PDF. The docbook document in question is rather large, but I managed to extract an except demonstrating the problem. The problem is that the footnote text and the body text overlap. I initially reported it to Debian as <URL: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=683197 > but thought it best to report it here too. The docbook source and the generated PDF is attached to the Debian bug report. Notice in the example how the text of the footnote on the second to last page is overlapping with the body. I generated the PDF using this command: xmlto --noautosize -m xmlto-pdf.xsl --with-fop pdf bad-footnote.xml The full document set is available from <URL: https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/free-culture-lessig >, if you want to check it out. When I investigated some more, I concluded that the problem is with the fop processor, not xmlto. The problem exist in both fop versions 1:0.95.dfsg-11 and 1:1.0.dfsg2-6 in Debian. The fo code generated by xmlto include the footnote content as it should, and when I manually process the .fo file using fop, the resulting PDF have the overlapping text. I am attaching the .fo file I used to test this, to allow you to reproduce the problem and try to find a fix. :) Could this be the same problem reported in <URL: https://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=51304 > This issue make fop useless for making the PDF version of the Free Culture book. :(
Hmm, Tried unsuccessfully to isolate what give this issue in the attached FO. IMHO, a possible cause is the b-p-d conversion to millipoint that is rounded (because integer), while original values are float. But that needs to be checked deeper. Changing anything that impacts the b-p-d position of footnote area causes a page break at the right place. For instance, a simple workaround here is to remove line-height-shift-adjustment from fo:root, and FOP becomes "magic"...