Extend provisional-distance-between-starts to allow the value "auto"

Hi,

It would be interesting to have the value "auto" for this property. When specified the property
would be computed using the width of the widest list-item-label, taking into account the
value of the provisional-label-separation property of course. The complexity of this is
comparable to automatic table layout.
The DocBook elements "variablelist" and "orderedlist" are good examples for its usefulness. In
both cases it can't be predicted how wide the labels will have to be. In the former case the
"termlength" attribute is available for manual specification, but in the latter no such attribute
exists. In any case, the document writer is forced to iteratively determine the good width, which
is against the spirit of the markup/stylesheet concept, in my opinion that is.
Of course, sometimes one wants to fix the label width and have text flow in it, but that is
another case altogether.

Regards,

Werner.
-- 
Werner Donné  --  Re BVBA
Engelbeekstraat 8		Papenhof 15
B-3300 Tienen			B-3583 Beringen
tel: (+32) 486 425803	e-mail: werner.donne@re.be

Received on Tuesday, 30 October 2001 07:42:26 UTC