Reply To: Typesetting style question

Hi Guys,

I’m surprised that the feature caused such an enthusiasm here and thought that Michelle’s solution was already an old hat ;-)

I’m not sure if this was mentioned before:

InDesigns paragraphs have no connection to each other, even if they are part of a list. The spanning feature is creating inside a textframe something that I call a “Layoutzone” (similiar to a footnote section). Within this Layoutzone it is possible to have additional spaces and to stick things together, even in one column.

Therefore it is possible to fake lists with one style, where a space before and after is needed, but the list elements must stick together. If we write this in HTML, we have e.g. a unordered list as container and inside the list elements. While the CSS for list elements have no space above or before, the ul-element has space above/before.

@Dwayne: If bulleted lists are displayes correctly in EPUB depends on the bullets & numbering feature. Not if you use 3 different styles or one spanning style. In my test a bulleted list with 3 spanning paras is exported to the correct ul and li-elements > so no worry.

@ Masood and David: This works not only with one column, it works e.g. with two columns too. The trick is, to stick the list-elements together, e.g. span in 2, set breaking options to stick all paras together.

Maybe a warning: The spaning feature can slow down documents, cause every time something is added or deleted in text, the layoutzones are recalculated. So even if it is a cool trick for short documents, I would test it before running on longer documents.

And: We had this topic three years ago in the Adobe scripting forum and I write a script, that search for one para style and apply different styles to the first and last one of a list: https://forums.adobe.com/message/6620683#6620683

Kai