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• • September 18, 2013 at 4:12 am #65357
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Douglas Waterfall, the lead InDesign architect at Adobe, asked an interesting question over on another blog post:

    Nested Styles is an incredibly complex feature. Applying only within a Paragraph simplifies it a lot – there are no external dependencies and we are essentially applying extra Character Styles on top of what may or may not be already there.
    Applying the same concept to paragraph styles, where you would change the style applied based on neighboring context, would be a lot, lot more messy for us. Those complexities, and the limited nature of the target audience, results in us not seriously considering it.
    Perhaps a more successful tack is to narrow down the needed functionality to the bare minimum and not compare too closely to Frame. We need a model that works for ID.
    The best I heard some years back was to target specific attributes, such as space before and space after, which would take on alternate values based one context. That’s much more narrow focus and easier for us to mentally process.
    What are the 3 critical paragraph attributes which need this treatment?

    I’d love to hear what people think about this.

    From my perspective, the most important options (and ones that would make a huge difference in ease of document layout) are:
    1. Space Before/After
    2. First line indent

    The first would handle the typical differences in paragraphs at the beginning, middle, or end of a list.
    The second would handle the difference in paragraphs immediately following a heading, or at the beginning of a story.

  • September 18, 2013 at 8:52 am #65370
    Peter Gold

    Member

    First of all: BIG THANKS TO DAVID FOR TAKING THIS TOPIC SO SERIOUSLY AS TO HONOR IT WITH ITS OWN FORUM!!!

    Second: BIG THANKS TO DOUGLAS FOR TAKING THIS TOPIC SO SERIOUSLY AS TO LOOK INTO IT. ADOBE’S DEVELOPERS ARE THE MOST-USER-INVOLVED I’VE SEEN IN MAJOR COMPANIES!

    So, now, to the topic:

    Hi, Douglas

    I may have clouded the problem by presenting it with the larger context in which structured FrameMaker operates.

    David’s made this SO EASY. By stating his two important desires (about position-aware paragraphs, anyway) he clears the air, IMO.

    I agree that document-wide awareness is a MAJOR task. However, stepping back and looking at David’s points, reminds me to emphasize that the essential issue is paragraph formatting, not document parsing. So, I’d be happy to see lists behave with self-awareness. As a completely unaware-about-software-engineering person, I hope that limiting the task to lists will make it more possible to achieve. I don’t know if InDesign’s named lists offer enough of a hook to connect the context-aware formatting to, or if an additional identifier would be necessary, either a separate property item in the paragraph style definition, like nested styles or advance type, or if an additional check box in the list definition would suffice.

    The main “gotcha” I see is where paragraphs use named numbered lists for paragraphs that aren’t contiguous, like headings and subheadings, table and graphic captions, etc. Context awareness behavior should be confined to operate within a contiguous set of paragraphs that have the context-awareness property. The context awareness property should be disabled in stand-alone paragraphs.

    So, this isn’t formatting based on location within a story, but based on a style property. Boiled down, Structured FrameMaker’s context-aware formatting behavior is limited to paragraphs. The list awareness operations format paragraphs that bear the list property.

    Not necessary to read more here, unless you want to know a little more about structured FrameMaker works.

    FrameMaker’s structure is essentially based on an SGML/XML Document Type Definition (DTD.) This is a set of rules about the order of paragraph types (aka “elements”.) Those who know DTDs know this in detail. Simply it means that there’s a rule for a document type that says the first paragraph/element must be some kind of title, like chapter, volume, index, table of somethingorother, etc. There are rules that specify the paragraphs/elements that follow – which elements must come after which elements, which elements can be within specified other elements, which elements can contain specified elements.

    There’s a way to indicate when rules are broken – a color is applied in a graphic map of the structure at the location of the violation, and/or a message or alert is presented.

    This is something that advocates for improving InDesign’s XML probably hope to see in InDesign someday.

  • September 18, 2013 at 6:23 pm #65385
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    Even some simple rule-based formatting would be welcome. Such as, bullet/number lists could have a group-based orphan control. Right now, one can “lock” a group of bullet/number items together with the keep with previous setting; it would be nice to have a keep at least two bullet/items together at either the beginning or end of the list.

    I find that using paragraph space before for body text and based-on lists solves the most issues with the first/middle/last line problems. However, that can cause spacing problems with subheads. That is where context- or rule-based formatting would come in handy.

  • September 19, 2013 at 1:54 am #65396
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    I have always wanted the last bullet in a list to know it’s the last one and have a greater Space After – is this the kind of context-dependent formatting you are talking about?

    I have never even seen FM in the wild so have not been able to follow the more technical aspects of the discussion.

  • September 19, 2013 at 6:54 am #65400
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    FrameMaker can do it only if using structured authoring, usually XML/DITA based. It requires setting up an EDD (which combines formatting with the DTD rules). Fun stuff in a geeky sort of way…

  • September 19, 2013 at 9:24 am #65411
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Here is another example of needing to change space before/after conditionally, depending on where it is… in this case, inside a Table of Contents!

    TOC line spacing between para styles

  • October 26, 2013 at 10:29 pm #65992
    LGFN

    Member

    Another conditional formatting might be helpful (yes, for lists): The option to automatically restart numbering in lists if the current paragraph isn’t after another “list paragraph”.

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