Bulleted and numbered list indent weirdness

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Mark_Hazeldine
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Joined: Fri Jan 15, 2010 6:16 pm
Location: London, UK

Bulleted and numbered list indent weirdness

Unread post by Mark_Hazeldine »

Hi,

I keep experiencing issues with the indenting in bulleted and numbered lists. I use a lot of lists in the manual i write. Mainly for action steps and See Also links at the bottom.
I get an issue sometimes (seems fairly random to me) where I'll create a list and save the page, then go to another topic. Then when I go back to the original topic the indenting on one or some of the list lines as strayed from its correct position.
This seems to happen normally when i've been copying and pasting lines between lists (rather than when creating a new list and typing everything out).
Normally, my workaround to fix this is to select the affected line/lines and reapply my indented style. Sometimes this works, and other times I have to apply the style to a totally different line in the list, and it fixes other lines. I can only think that it's something to do with the way the xml code is copied and pasted and is causing problems with the list items.

See the attached screenshot.

Thanks, Mark
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Mark_Hazeldine
Posts: 102
Joined: Fri Jan 15, 2010 6:16 pm
Location: London, UK

Re: Bulleted and numbered list indent weirdness

Unread post by Mark_Hazeldine »

Just looking at the code, it seems that when the issue occurs, I find the <li styleclass="Normal"> tag at the beginning of the line. After I apply my style, it changes back to <li styleclass="ListAction">.
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Tim Green
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Re: Bulleted and numbered list indent weirdness

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Mark,

What you need to know here is that all lists, including multi-level lists, only have one indent setting for the numbers and bullets. This setting is stored in the first list item and that indent is used for the entire list. You can apply other paragraph settings to other list items, but only indent settings applied to the first list item have any effect at all. It's possible that with switching back and forth from the editor you are seeing an initial non-list formatting setting, followed by the updated list format when you switch back to the topic.

If you can produce a small demo project where the problem is reproducible please mail it to me at support AT ec-software.com (replace the AT with @) and we'll check it through.

List handling in its current form does have some limitations and an major overhaul is planned for Help & Manual 6. 8)
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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Mark_Hazeldine
Posts: 102
Joined: Fri Jan 15, 2010 6:16 pm
Location: London, UK

Re: Bulleted and numbered list indent weirdness

Unread post by Mark_Hazeldine »

Hmm,

yeah, that makes sense with what I'm experiencing. I'm happy to live with it for now if there are improvements coming. Now I know the first item affects the rest, i'll keep an eye on it to see what's happening more closely.

Thanks, Mark
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Tim Green
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Re: Bulleted and numbered list indent weirdness

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Mark,

Bad news: It turns out that this is actually necessary. As so often, the problem is caused by Internet Explorer. If you nest tables in IE and a nested table has an indent then it's not allowed to have a 100% width because this will trigger width bugs in IE that will cause spurious horizontal scrollbars because the width of the page adds up to more than 100%.This happens because for technical reasons that can't be changed, the tables are enclosed in DIVs. Any direct solution to this would trigger these bugs, and the 99% width trick would probably also have the same effect.

The only reliable way to avoid this is as follows:

1. Make sure that the main toggle table containing the nested toggles has no indent.
2. Make sure that any nested tables or toggle tables inside the main table also have no indents.
3. Avoid using complex tables, particularly tables with merged cells.
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

Private support:
Please do not email or PM me with private support requests -- post to the forum directly.
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