Hanging indent

[GlennV]

Hi,

I'm looking for information on the hanging indent automatically applied to list items. How does one find the value of the hanging indent? How does one manipulate that value?

Thanks,

Glenn

[NorthEast]

You do this by editing the properties for the ol (numbered list) and ul (bullet list) styles.

padding-left sets the distance of the list item text from the left edge of the list container (ol or ul).

margin-left sets the indentation of the list container, i.e. the distance of numbers/bullets from the left margin (if using the default 'outside' position for numbers/bullets, the margin is roughly the distance to the centre of the number/bullet).


Best way is just to try it out and see what results you get.

[GlennV]

Thanks Dave.

Yes, I understand about padding and margins. Both of these adjustments move the bullet or number along with the text as a single unit regardless of whether it's margined in from the page edge or padded in from the box edge.

The space I'm trying to manipulate is between the bullet or number and the text itself. In page layout tools this is done using tabs, hanging indents, first line settings, etc depending on the tool. HTML doesn't have tabs.

After playing with different settings of padding, margins, and even indents it seems that the number or bullet is attached to the first line of text at a predefined, invisible, and immutable space/length between itself and the first letter of the first line.

This immutable space seems to be about 20 pixels wide. Is there any way to know the exact measurement?

Glenn

[LTinker68]

This immutable space seems to be about 20 pixels wide. Is there any way to know the exact measurement?

That might be dependent on the browser and/or the font family and/or the font size.

You get more control if you don't use HTML-standard lists and instead use paragraph classes and the auto-numbering fields.

[ChoccieMuffin]

Was there ever an answer found to this? I have numbered lists <ol> and bulleted lists <ul> and while I can get the text of the two lists lining up nicely, the bullets and numbers seem to be different distances from the text. What I wanted to achieve is to have the left edge of the bullets and numbers aligned with regular body text and the text of the lists aligned with each other, but despite faffing around for a good couple of hours, I can't figure it out. Any tips, tricks, suggestions, work-rounds or just plain hacks that I can use to make my stuff look pretty?