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Paragraph Spacing with lists

Posted: Thu Feb 01, 2007 12:53 am
by Danoz
I would like to see Mellel have an option to have 'smart' paragraph spacing inside lists. What I mean by this is...

In making a new list style, have a check box for "Smart Paragraph Spacing". What this will do is disable the 'before' and 'after' paragraph spacing of the paragraph style between list items except for the last list item which will retain the 'after' paragraph spacing of the paragraph style.

Nick

PS I am not so sure that 'smart' is the right term to use, and in general when others, especially M$ use it, it is almost universally not 'smart' :wink:

Posted: Thu Feb 01, 2007 4:07 am
by rpcameron
I, too, agree. This allows for keeping your regular paragraph spaces, and not need to resort to ad hoc changes for all-but-last items in a list.

Posted: Thu Feb 01, 2007 11:45 pm
by xaxa
Brilliant idea!

Posted: Tue Feb 06, 2007 6:35 pm
by digimarkus
I would love to see this sort of feature. Although I wonder if it could be more of a generic conditional formating feature that could also be applied to other situations.

Perhaps it would work to have different before and after paragraph spacing for any "block sequence" of similarly formatted items (or when the next style is X do Y sort of thing). This would of course be able to achieve what is suggested here for lists, but it could also be used for any sequence of any same (or what follows next) paragraph style situations.

For example, I like to be consistent in setting the space between paragraph styles items always at the top (or, always at the bottom). This generally works well except if a sub heading follows a title directly, or sub-sub heading follows directly after a sub heading. If a sub heading, or a sub-sub heading follows a paragraph everything works great, but when a subordinate header follows directly after its parent (as they sometimes do) I would like to have a different size of space so that the spacing between headers looks correct to the eye. This is really the same reason that there is already a conditional option in Mellel to turn off paragraph spacing at the top of a page or column. To have this sort of conditional spacing between different paragraph styles would be great.

- Mark

Posted: Tue Feb 06, 2007 6:54 pm
by rpcameron
Mark,

I think you've hit the nail on the head, and this is really the direction it ought to take; the type of full/optimal implementation that we've come to expect from the Redlers.

However, this does open one new can of worms: We now need some type of method to list exceptions to established rules. This is where is gets incredibly difficult—not in the concept, but rather in the implementation to make it intuitive and effective, without sacrificing any other feature in the mean time. This will be difficult to balance between the existing styles system, and a condition exception list.

Posted: Tue Feb 27, 2007 12:46 pm
by jolinwarren
I agree with Mark that some sort of more generalised solution would be best. In particular, I would like to have some amount of paragraph spacing between list items, but not as much as between normal paragraphs. :-)