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...

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...