Help on table align on left of page vs left hanging indent

[=?iso-8859-1?q?Jean-Fran=E7ois_Michaud?=]

Hello guys,

I was wondering if anybody here had implemented a solution where
Tables are aligned according to what the hanging indent tells us when
there is a potential for the table overflowing in the right margin or
out of the page.

I did some research a while back and came to the conclusion at that
time that it wasn't possible to have both (either we align on the
hanging indent and if there is a potential for a table to be 6.75
inches wide then we can have a page overflow or we align on the left
content margin and if the case occurs where we have 6.75 inch tables,
we're safely covered but table alignment is not entierly intuitive
from a visual standpoint).

The best would be to sum up the hanging indent values for me to
compare against the total width of the table.

Basically, knowing that a page can contain a table that's 6.75 inches
wide, I would do:

If [6.75 - sum(hierarchical hanging indents) > sum(table column
widths)]
{
Align on left of current hanging indent
}
else
{
Align on left of page to prevent overflow
}

The problem is that, from what I understand, the hanging indents are
dynamically calculated at runtime, which means I can't grab the values
so that I can send them downwards until a table element is reached
which means I can't implement the above logic which means I'm stuck
having to align on the left of the page to prevent potential table/
page overflows.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Regards
Jeff Michaud

 

[Joseph Kesselman]

I was wondering if anybody here had implemented a solution where
Tables are aligned according to what the hanging indent tells us when
there is a potential for the table overflowing in the right margin or
out of the page.

In what markup language? If HTML, this is the wrong list. If some other
markup, you need to be explicit about which, since XML is the base
syntax for many.

 

[=?iso-8859-1?q?Jean-Fran=E7ois_Michaud?=]

In what markup language? If HTML, this is the wrong list. If some other
markup, you need to be explicit about which, since XML is the base
syntax for many.

Thanks for answering, but I ended up figuring it out on my own . And
to clarify further, I'm referencing XML/XSLT/XSL:FO.

I had to stop using relative referencing (start-indent and end-indent
on body-start() and label-end()) to instead use an absolute frame of
reference (left side of page) which I use to cascade down cumulative
hierarchical nested indents throught the templates. This allows me to
have full control over the indent and to know what the degree of the
indent is (as opposed to not being able to calculate anything if I use
body-start() and label-end() since those values are generated at
runtime as opposed to compile time).

Regards
Jean-Francois Michaud