Header margins vs. body margins

jay6678 · Post by **jay6678** » Fri May 02, 2008 8:23 am

Hi...my question is about getting your headers lined up outside of your body content on a printed page. Example: Body content=1 inch margin, header =.5 inch margin. It seems that every time I change a margin, be it in Print page settings or through my stylesheet...the body and header continue to align at what ever the margin is set. The only option for adjusting the header margin seems to be from the top...not left to right. Can anyone relate? Help me troubleshoot?
This is for Printed Documentation output to Word.
Thanks Much!!
--Jay

jay6678 · Post by **jay6678** » Fri May 02, 2008 1:26 pm

No takers on this one...or is that obvious that I'm just missing it. Please help

Thanks in advance...

Post by **LTinker68** » Fri May 02, 2008 1:38 pm

I guess I'm not following what you're asking. The <body> tag is the king. If you set it to have 1.0" margin on all sides, then no other tag can extend beyond that margin setting, unless you specify a negative value for the margin for that tag. So if you want your main content text to be 1" from all sides, but you want your headings to be .5" from the left instead of 1", then you'd have to set the margin-left property on the heading tag to be -.5".

I don't generally generate print output -- just hasn't been a need for it -- so I haven't tested this to see if it would work that way in Word output. If it doesn't, then you'd have to reverse it. That is, the body tag would be set to a margin of .5", your headings would be set to .5" margins, and your <p> tags and other content tags would be set to 1" margins.

Hopefully that made sense.

KevinDAmery · Post by **KevinDAmery** » Fri May 02, 2008 1:39 pm

I think you may be getting confused about what "body" is in this case--it's not the same thing as body in printed docs. Here, Body is the entire content of the topic (i.e. everything between the <body> and </body> tags in the html document). As a result, it includes your headings.

To get the effect you're after, add a margin-left attribute to any style that you want indented--for example, your P styles, your LI styles, etc. Leave anything you want outdented with a smaller margin-left or even no margin-left at all.

Post by **LTinker68** » Fri May 02, 2008 2:25 pm

KevinDAmery wrote:I think you may be getting confused about what "body" is in this case...

Was that to me or jay6678? I was speaking from a code/tag point-of-view.

KevinDAmery · Post by **KevinDAmery** » Mon May 05, 2008 5:27 am

LTinker68 wrote:
KevinDAmery wrote:I think you may be getting confused about what "body" is in this case...
Was that to me or jay6678? I was speaking from a code/tag point-of-view.

Sorry, it was to Jay6678 (once again, the dangers of simultaneous posting...)

jay6678 · Post by **jay6678** » Mon May 05, 2008 5:50 am

Thanks for your responses...however, you are addressing HEADINGS...and my question was about HEADERS (as in header/footer). Perhaps I didn't phrase it properly enough. But I would like my HEADERS (page number/title of document for even/odd/first pages) to extend outside of the text of the document (call it body including headings and paragraphs).
So again, does anyone know a way to have the HEADERS be placed at margins outside of the content of the topic for Print Output.
Thanks again!!
-Jay

KevinDAmery · Post by **KevinDAmery** » Mon May 05, 2008 6:28 am

The same principle applies, though. In HTML authoring, EVERYTHING that the user sees appears in the Body tags (Headers and Footers are not separate entities the way they are in print). Any margin property that you apply to the Body tag is applied to the entire content.

So what I would do is set your Body margins to the widest amount you want (i.e. to match what you need for your Headers and Footers), then apply additional left or right padding to everything (and I mean everything - p tags, h1 tags, you name it) that will appear anywhere else. You can create a generic class for headers / footers that resets the padding to 0.

jay6678 · Post by **jay6678** » Mon May 05, 2008 7:31 am

Thanks for the suggestion...it seems logical, but also seems to be a lot of work for a such a basic style request. I'll try this and let you know. Again - thanks!

jay6678 · Post by **jay6678** » Mon May 05, 2008 11:44 am

Kevin I tried your suggestion, but that does not seem to work, unless I am still doing something wrong. If the Body tag controls everything, what is the sense of adjusting the padding? I've tried a few things now and nothing seems to change the margin of the body except the margin of the masterpage - which also controls the margin of the headers/footers. Not sure what to do from here with this issue.

KevinDAmery · Post by **KevinDAmery** » Mon May 05, 2008 12:34 pm

You want your headers / footers to have a margin of .5 inches and your main text flow to have a margin of 1 inches, correct? So, what you do is you set the Body of the master page to .5" then add .5" left and right padding to all of your styles except the ones you use for headers and footers. Or at least that's how I would do it (when I do print output I have the headers / footers lining up with the main text flow rather than sticking out, so the issue hasn't come up for me).

wclass · Post by **wclass** » Mon May 05, 2008 3:54 pm

How are your headers and footers set up, as paragraphs or tables? The default print master page puts them into tables, which is harder to move in Word margins. I've created a paragraph class (p.header - you might need left and right) and made the margin-left property a negative number (-2cm in my case) and left the body tags alone. This comes across in Word OK.

You might be out of luck if you need your headers/footers inside tables.

jay6678 · Post by **jay6678** » Tue May 06, 2008 7:17 am

Finally! Success! Thanks so much to Margaret and Kevin - together you definitely helped me. I would suggest for anyone else who has this problem to do a combination of things. First, assign firstpage, even and odd HEADER proxies in your master TOC. Then create subclasses for your HEADERS (example: p.headereven; p.headerodd; p.headerfirst) and make the margins for those subclasses to be OUTSIDE of your PAGE margins. (example: your PAGE margin to the left and right is 1". Make your NEW header margins minus (-).5"). This keeps the HEADERS outside of the page. For what ever reason, Flare picked this up better than working with padding. But, regardless....it worked! Finally. Also, I allowed myself to get very familiar with CSS in the Internal Text Editor so that I became more familiar with how things looked in conjuction to how they were assigned. I used the Internal Text Editor to tweak some things that weren't looking pretty to make them behave like those that were.
Thank you to all!

Post by **LTinker68** » Tue May 06, 2008 8:12 am

jay6678 wrote:For what ever reason, Flare picked this up better than working with padding.

FYI... Margins control the distance from the outside of an element to its parent tag. Padding controls the distance from the element's edge to the text inside the element. So if you increased padding, then your text was moving further and further away from the page edge. You needed to adjust the margin to get you closer to the page edge.

Just remember margin is outside and padding is inside.

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Header margins vs. body margins

Header margins vs. body margins

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