Reply To: How to indent text?

[Su-Laine Yeo]

XMetaL can indent text, however because you're working with XML which separates meaning from formatting, there is a slightly different way of thinking to get used to. In XML, instead of saying, “indent this text”, you say why you want the text to be indented and you set up stylesheets.

There are many reasons you might want text to be indented. E.g.
– It's a paragraph within a bulleted list
– It's a secondary bullet within a bulleted list item
– It's a third-level heading and you want to distinguish it from second-level headings
– It's an ordinary paragraph, and you want all paragraphs to be indented more than they are now
– It's a long quotation

Once you know the purpose of formatting a particular piece of text, the next step is to find out what element type or structural form in your XML language (in your case, DITA) best matches that purpose. E.g. DITA has a structural concept that bulleted lists can contain paragraphs. If you're new to DITA, this is probably the hardest step, but it's really important. Can you explain why you want the text to be indented?

If you're using the right element types in the right locations, XMetaL's default stylesheets might indent it automatically. If not, please post an example of what you want indented (including the tags), and someone will explain how to change the stylesheets.

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