Tricky CSS box model problem

[iand]

I am trying to use CSS to make a large circle for my bullet points to match output produced in Framemaker although it would work with any ascii symbol. I can't use an image for my list marker because images are too blocky or too big in PDF output as you can't set the resolution to use for PDF output for these images (this is a bit of a CSS limitation!). Anyway, I have tried the following CSS which partly works:

ul li:before
{
display: marker;
font: Arial;
font-size: 40pt;
content: "\2022 T";
}

This image was captured from Flare's print preview display:


The "bullet" is the correct size but unfortunately this makes the bounding box too big which messes up the vertical alignment. My cunning idea is to shrink the box. Anyone know how I can do that? I thought this would do the trick but it doesn't:

margin-top: -10pt;
margin-bottom: -10pt;

The green rectangle shows the current box. The red rectangle shows the box I would like.

largebullets.png

[LTinker68]

I wonder if you'd have better luck if you used a paragraph tag with an auto-numbering format instead of using a standard HTML list.

[KevinDAmery]

I may be missing something, but wouldn't that red bounding box result in the text of different lines overlapping the capital letters?

[GregStenhouse]

Try negative padding, that has done the trick for me before. But as LTinker said, autonumbers are a good way to go for this kind of thing. Just copy the required bullet into the mc-auto-number-format class, and play around with the mc-auto-number-class if you want different color effects, sizes etc applied.

[iand]

Hi everyone,
Thanks for the suggestions. It seems that the display marker command prevents use of negative margins or negative padding, this seems to be a limitation in CSS, the same thing happens if I try this CSS in a web browser. I tried display block but that had it's own problems. I think I will have to use a paragraph tag with autonumbering as suggested. I prefer my lists to be tagged as lists, but it looks like I won't be able to manage that.

Thanks for your help

Ian