one more bit of carping and whining about <variablelist>

["Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday@mindspring.com>]

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• From: "Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday@mindspring.com>
• To: docbook apps list <docbook-apps@lists.oasis-open.org>
• Date: Fri, 5 Sep 2003 13:33:28 -0400 (EDT)

  based on a bit more testing, i have one more issue with <variablelist>.
well, ok, two.  (obviously, i'm not going to get any *real* work done
today. :-(

  first, the online TDG demonstrates that a variablelist can be rendered
so that the terms actually overlap their corresponding listitem's, as in:

  TTF

        True Type fonts

  PFA, PFB

        PostScript fonts.

note the slight overlap, where the listitem is not pushed over 
*completely* based on the length of the term.  this is not what
happens at the moment.  with all my tests, the listitem gets
cranked all the way to the right so that there is no overlap,
as in:

  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
  xxxxx                                listitem here

and so on.  so is the example shown in TDG misleading?  under what
circumstances would that occur?  or is that related to the change
to "em * 0.60"?

  second point is that, given multiple terms, the possible break
to render them over two lines can be very badly chosen.  with
the two terms "/bin" and "/usr/bin", what i got was:

  /bin,/
  usr/bin     standard system executables

yuck.

  comments?

rday

p.s.  i can find them as fast as you can fix them. :-)

p.p.s.  i asked bob s. offline, but what the heck.  can anyone point me
at the customization to generate page numbers of the hyphenated form
<chapter>-<page>, as in 1-1, 1-2, ..., 2-1, 2-2 and so on?

i had it once.  then i lost it.  dang.

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