Is there a way to count tags on a physical (PDF) page using XSL-FO?

Question

Here is the scenario. I have an XML document which contains tags. I want to create a transform that does this

<tag>content A</tag>           1. content A
<tag>content B</tag>  ---->    2. content B
<tag>content C</tag>           3. content C

but only if the tag contents appear on the same physical page. The numbering should restart on each new page. Is there any way to do this using XSL-FO? I know with latex the only way to accomplish something like this is to run latex twice, with the interim document used to determine content page placement.

Answer 1

As far as I can tell (and as confirmed by the Antenna House tech support team), there is no way to do this using standard XSL-FO . Antenna House offers <axf:footnote*/> extensions which include the ability to set an axf:footnote-number-reset="page" attribute, and as suggested in the comments, RenderX offers a generic mechanism which might be used for this purpose, but both of these involve vendor-specific extensions to the language.

This points to a number of shortcomings in XSL-FO that really should have been addressed a long time ago with a 2.0 version of the specification. A w3c committee to develop an XSL-FO 2.0 spec was formed and then disbanded quite some time ago; I have no idea why, as I find the tool indispensable for a large class of document to PDF conversions.