controlling processing on variblelist term entires

[Mats Wichmann <mats@wichmann.us>]

Hi, folks.

I'm not having any joy finding an approach here...

I've sort of inherited a documentation project that has an aspect that
doesn't look good.  The project has a bunch of methods that exist in
pairs - a global function, and a class method (the language is Python,
fwiw).  These often have differences (e.g. often the global function
takes an extra argument), so a common signature doesn't necessarily
work, you want to list both. Whoever set this up presents these as
entries in a variablelist, with the method signatures as the terms.  So
we can see something like this:

<variablelist>
  <varlistentry>
    <term>function(with long signature)<term>
    <term>cls.function(with long signature)</term>
    <listitem>description of behaviour</listitem>
  </varlistentry>
  etc.

This really wants to be rendered with a line break between each term in
order to look sane, but of course defaults into a single comma-separated
line (which often wraps even in a wide browser window when looking at
html output, if the signature part is indeed really long).  In the worst
cases there may actually be four terms for one definition.  This
approach is probably the wrong one, but since it's Python, switching
over to <funcsynopsis> or <methodsynopsis> style markup doesn't really
work (e.g. trailing semicolons, which Python doesn't want). A foray into
setting the separator with a "dbhtml term-separator" didn't seem to
yield anything (and would only affect the html output anyway).

Any thoughts?

thanks,

-- mats