[xep-support] margin-left inherited as start-indent?

Nikolai Grigoriev grig at renderx.com
Tue Apr 20 02:39:05 PDT 2004


Bob,

> According to the spec, margin-left is not inherited (7.10.3) and
> start-indent is inherited (7.10.7). This is the behavior I get from XEP.
> When I tested with Antenna House, I found that margin-left was inherited.

Antenna House is right here. The value of 'margin-left' is used to calculate
the computed value of 'start-indent', by a formula

start-indent = inherited-property-value(start-indent) + 
            + margin-left + border-left-width + padding-left

This calculated value should be both used to position the current block 
element, and inherited down the tree to the contents of the block container - 
exactly like Antenna House does.

Thank you for reporting this problem. Unfortunately, I cannot promise 
a quick fix to this bug. There are many problems with this calculation 
because all operands in the above equation may be expressed as 
percentages of the reference area size, and will not be known until
the page master is selected. To keep the things going, XEP implements 
an independent mechanism of CSS-style margins that coexists with 
indents. This works well with normal blocks; but fails to pass the 
right value for inherited indents into container elements. 

As a general rule, I'd recommend to always reset indents inside 
any element that establishes a new reference area (e.g. by inserting
a fo:wrapper within each fo:block-container, and specifying
zero indents there). Otherwise, the positioning of the container 
is going to affect its contents, which is rarely a desired behaviour. 
The same applies to table cells, footnotes, and floats: all these 
elements should inherit indents from their parents, despite the 
fact that they reference their indents from a different reference ares. 

Best regards,
Nikolai Grigoriev
RenderX

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