List Text in columns when centralised

[RKEP71]

What I am trying to achieve is to have a book / chapter list central on the page and the text move to a set position when it starts on the next line and not position centrally.

E.G. 1 (please ignore dots I couldn't position text properly without them)

Central looks like this

...............1 As Darkness Falls
2 What Happened Next - A peculiar thing?

Setting the margins, I can make it look like this

...............1 As Darkness Falls
...............2 What Happened Next - A peculiar thing?

The problem is, that when I zoom on my reader and the text dosent fit on one line it then looks like this

...............1 As Darkness Falls
...............2 What Happened Next - A peculiar
.......................................thing?

Now I have overcome this problem by using two span left codes, one for the number and one for the text and can position the next line where I like

E.G. 2

...............1 As Darkness Falls
...............2 What Happened Next - A peculiar
..................thing?

But in doing this creates another problem!!! I set up the list for medium zoom. When I zoom larger, no problem the margins seem to be fixed and it reformats as above.

Now if I reduce the zoom to small or x-small the whole text moves to the left.

I'm not sure what happens here because it appears the span left margins I set reduce aswell as the text, pulling it off center but when zooming larger I don't notice the margin getting bigger narrowing the text???

I could set it up on x-small zoom but this will mean when zooming larger the text will stay in a very narrow colomn in the center and I want it spread out to my desired width.

So does anybody know if there is a way around this??? Is it possible to make vertical colomns and position them???

[DaleDe]

You cannot place columns and tab to the column boundary. However you can use different units for margins that will change as the text size changes. You can also outdent the first line to make the rest of the paragraph indented when if wraps around. As you said you can use span to change part of the text and you can even set the display to in-line instead of block to provide two ways to set margins. Fore example you can place an h3 in-line with a paragraph.

[RKEP71]

Hi Dalede

Thanks for the advice so far your obviously pretty switched on with the html codes. I have been just learning by trial and error and looking how other books have done things.

I have done everything I can think of, block and in-line just seems to place any dropped lines centrally and I can't get the indents to work how I would like. As your suggestion I tried h3 and had similar results. The best I've been able to achieve is as per my example.

I would greatly appreciate it if you could give a working example that I might be able to figure out when I see how you've done it.

Also you mentioned using different units for margins are you refering to px, em, %. These are the only ones I'm aware of, are there anymore?

Cheers!

[DaleDe]

There are px, em, pts, and % but in your case you should problem stick with em's. As I look at your results I think you need to use negative indents. The idea is to set the margin for the paragraph where you want the follow-on lines of the paragraph and and then outdent (a negative text-indent) where you want the numbers. For example:

{ margin-left: 5em; text-indent: -2.5em; }

this is the trick I uses for outlines and poems.

Dale