XSL-FO fop. Long text flows into adjacent cells/block, obscuring stuff there

Question

Could anyone suggest me a way to make long words (like serial numbers) to be wrapped? I tried some commercial software and there is no such issue. Is it a fop bug or probabl

Answer 1

Zkoh's answer (wraping) will help you only if the text contains multiple words split by white spaces. In case of long words (as mensioned in question), hyphenation is way to go (as Daniel suggested).

There can be quite a few problems with hyphenation in FOP:

1. FOP is using hyphenation algorithms from TeX and because of some licencing issues, those algorithms (at least for some languages) are not part of standard FOP binary distribution (as stated here) and must be downloaded separately from OFFO web site. There are two kinds of hyphenation pattern files on the website. XML format (which needs to be compiled 1st to be used with FOP) and JAR file (already compiled). Be sure to download compiled version! Installation is straightforward and well documented - just drop the OFFO binary into FOP's lib folder and thats it...
2. Don't forget to specify language of your document and if needed, enable hyphenation on block level (its inherited so add it to the root element and you should be fine) - see FOP FAQ