[Doc-SIG] Re: David's Idea for Lazy Indentation

[Moore, Paul]

> And the ambiguity remains::
>     - Look at the hyphen at the beginning of the next line
>     - is it a second list item marker, or a dash in the text?
>
>     Similarly, we may want to refer to numbers inside enumerated
>     lists:
>
>     1. How many socks in a pair? There are
>     2. How many pants in a pair? Exactly
>     1. Go figure.

Excuse my butting in - I'm not a member of the doc-sig, but I noticed this
while browsing the web archives.

Surely this is a simple case of "don't do this"? My understanding is that
"structured text" (whatever form) should be something that can be
automatically translated into other forms (TeX, HTML, PDF, whatever) but
which is (as well as possible) readable in plain form. In which case, your
two examples are *only* "readable" as lists. So define the rules to state
that:

    1. A line starting with the list marker (hyphen, or whatever) is
*always*
       a new item. If you don't want that, change the line break, as it
wouldn't
       be readable as plain text anyway.
    2. A line in an enumerated list which starts with a number is *always*
       a new item. If you don't want that, change the line break, as it
wouldn't
       be readable as plain text anyway.

Paul.

PS As a check, did my enumerated list above work as (re-)structured text? I
haven't looked at the rules (other than a brief "skim" which confirmed that
I like the general feel, but this is how I'd write enumerated lists by
default, so it would be nice if it was recognised as such by the parser...