I'm not sure why Mark says that the captured text cannot be mid-paragraph or has to fit on a single line, but he is correct that the text has to be "tagged" (either with px/pa or cs/ce or start/end tags and using XyPerl).

As far as I know, the captured text can be longer than one line if using cs/ce or if using px/pa or start/end tags with XyPerl the suppressed text can then be re-output back into the (main) stream and then result in more than a single (composed) line of (generated) text.

But the "details" are important, as what else (i.e. coding) is in the captured text may pose some challenges in what could otherwise be a straightforward solution.

Jonathan Dagresta
SDL XPP Engineering

I'm not sure why Mark says that the captured text cannot be mid-paragraph or has to fit on a single line, but he is correct that the text has to be "tagged" (either with px/pa or cs/ce or start/end tags and using XyPerl).

As far as I know, the captured text can be longer than one line if using cs/ce or if using px/pa or start/end tags with XyPerl the suppressed text can then be re-output back into the (main) stream and then result in more than a single (composed) line of (generated) text.

But the "details" are important, as what else (i.e. coding) is in the captured text may pose some challenges in what could otherwise be a straightforward solution.

Jonathan Dagresta
SDL XPP Engineering

Hi JD. If a para was tagged <p> text </p> and that text ran over multiple lines, there's no way to pick out a mid-para line. That was what I meant. Perhaps I didn't make that clear ;)     However, I have always wondered why Frills Proc can't extract a line's text - i.e. the mid-para scenario.   It exists. XPP knows its there. XPP knows all sorts of info about it (max ascender height, indents, etc etc), why not extract the text using F.P.  (although I realise that everything about F.P. querying XPP returns only numbers.   It would certainly make life (as a developer) easier having direct access to non-explicitly tagged text. (i.e. the mid-para scenario)

Yes, Mark, it was not clear to me.

However, if you had <p>text1 text2 <capture>text3 text4</capture> text5 text6</p> then you could capture the "mid-para line" tagged by the "capture" tag.

How else would you define what it is that you want to capture? Do you really just want to capture some "random" line in the middle of the paragraph that is just determined by where the beginning and ending line breaks occur? Seems like a strange use case to me.

As I said, XPP does not currently provide a way in frills processing to directly extract a line's text during frills processing.

That would be an RFE, i.e. something that could be entered as an SDL XPP Idea.

I don't believe that there is any way that XPP classic macro processing would be able to just give you back a "string". In my thinking, there would have to be added some way to capture a "line" into something like a text register. There would be a number of things to determine/design, and we would need to know what are the full set of  "requirements" of such a feature.

Jonathan Dagresta
SDL XPP Engineering

IMHO - yes, I might want to capture mid-para lines of text (no ability to capture composed lines) mid-para.  There may be some sort of other event that might trigger the need to 'read' the composed line of text. e.g. a number register is set to a particular value or a macro executes </fg>.

I certainly agree that it is probably time to take away the many limitations of frills processing.
Maybe it is time to put some thought in this and launch a new idea.
I would like to see:
- allow multiple fg macros on the same line, each triggering their own event
- add a number to the fg macro (fg;2) so that we can start different actions if we encounter a flag event
- add the horizontal position of the fg macro in the line as a frills processing variable
- allow each fg event to have its own px;;0 text register allowing to store several text strings on the same line
- and last but not least: I do see some value if the content of the current line could be read during frills processing

I have turned this into a new idea on the SDL idea page
So feel free to add other things that you find useful or things that I have missed.
Just go to https://community.sdl.com/ideas/contenta-ideas/i/ideas-xpp/extending-enhancing-xpp-frills-processing

Oh and please do not forget to vote my idea UP!