How does proportional-column-width work in xsl fo

How does proportional-column-width work? In the below example, what would 1 or 3.5 or 2 mean? Should these total to 10 which would make it 100%? or should I be specifying percentages instead?

<fo:table-column column-width="proportional-column-width(1)"/>
						<fo:table-column column-width="proportional-column-width(3.5)"/>
						<fo:table-column column-width="proportional-column-width(.8)"/>
						<fo:table-column column-width="proportional-column-width(2)"/>
						<fo:table-column column-width="proportional-column-width(1)"/>
						<fo:table-column column-width="proportional-column-width(2)"/>
						<fo:table-column column-width="proportional-column-width(1.5)"/>

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ank5Asked:
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Gertone (Geert Bormans)Information ArchitectCommented:
It is "proportional" compared to the other columns
the fourth column will have twice the width of the fifth column
as 2 to 1 in the proportional width

basically you can add all the proportional widths together, divide 100 by that total and for each column multiply by the proportional width value to get the % width
ank5Author Commented:
Is it possible to simply specify %?
Gertone (Geert Bormans)Information ArchitectCommented:
yes as width on the column
Gertone (Geert Bormans)Information ArchitectCommented:
In fact is the proportional-column-width(3.5) a transformation convenience
It is an easy way to put in whatever value you find in the XML you want to transform into FO
and let the FO processor sort the sizes out
If you need to do complex calculations to get to the proportional width, you would be doing the wrong thing

note
<fo:table-column column-width="proportional-column-width(30)"/>
<fo:table-column column-width="proportional-column-width(40)"/>
<fo:table-column column-width="proportional-column-width(30)"/>

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would render exactly the same as
<fo:table-column column-width="30%"/>
<fo:table-column column-width="40%"/>
<fo:table-column column-width="30%"/>

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The only difference is that with the first you don't  need to worry about the numbers adding up to 100, and in the second example you do need to worry...
I use proportional-width a lot for that reason

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