ChoccieMuffin wrote:Added another request. This is a real nuisance, particularly as ALL the other authoring programs I've played with - even Word - allow this really easily.
The problem is, they're not really analogous. When you use an HTML list, the numbers are not added into the content
at all. If you build the output and look at the page code, you still only see <li> tags -- you don't see 1, 2, 3, etc. It's the
browser that determines at
run time what the value of each <li> is. In order to xref to a specific number, the browser would first have to render the page to determine the resulting list numbers, then re-render the page to fill in the xref with the values that were determined in the first pass. Browsers aren't programmed to do that, so in order to do what you want, Flare would have to add functionality to build a new auto-number sequence at build time, change the HTML list structure (ol and li tags) to paragraphs using that auto-number format, then convert the xref tags to point to the appropriate resulting paragraph item. The above would result in in-page style definitions being created for the auto-number formats and possibly the xref tags, which would bloat the topic code,
and those in-page style definitions would override your stylesheet definitions because you'd no longer be using ol/li tags but in-page defined <p> styles. How many people have had problems styling their lists because in order to make a hanging outdent (?) list, Flare has to use a table structure to simulate that effect and people didn't know they had to style the table tags in order to control the look in the output?
If you know you're going to want to xref to a numbered item in a list, then start with the auto-numbered paragraph instead of an HTML list. Once you get the auto-number format set up in the stylesheet, it's just as easy to use that as to use the HTML list, plus you can xref to it. (Well, not quite as easy -- if you want to simulate a list-within-a-list then you have to select a different paragraph class for the first indented item then select the original class when you want to outdent, but that's still not that labor-intensive.)