Question

I wonder why having indented bulleted/ordered lists does not really work. If I use 6 (six) leading spaces before the * in a new paragraph (empty line before this line), I get two bullets on the same line. With nine spaces I get 3 bullets.

• first item
  • second item

• • third item

• • • fourth item

Is there not a way for Twiki to suppress the leading bullets?

• TWiki version: 03 August 2002
• Web server: Apache
• Server OS: Linux
• Web browser: Opera 6.03 (Linux)
• Client OS: Linux

-- MathiasKoerber - 01 Sep 2002

Answer

Don't leave blank lines between successive bullets, to avoid this. For example:

• first item
  • second item
  • third item
    • fourth item

-- RichardDonkin - 02 Sep 2002

Followup

But that's the problem . In some cases I want a blank line between entries (for betterformatting sake). Also, the same happens when I want to start a bulleted list further indented (starting with 6 spaces).

Any ideas?

-- MathiasKoerber - 03 Sep 2002

The real answer is to support CSS in TWiki and apply suitable formatting styles to the bullet lists. If you really want this level of control, the simplest thing is to write in HTML - TWiki markup is meant for pages where precise formatting is not critical.

-- RichardDonkin - 03 Sep 2002

Or as a workarounf, add a <p /> at the end of the bullet to simulate a blank line.

-- PeterThoeny - 07 Sep 2002

Just trying that out -- wasn't exactly sure what you meant but now I see -- to get:

• first item
  • second item

  • third item
    • fourth item

enter:

   * first item<p />
      * second item<p />
      * third item<p />
         * fourth item<p />

-- RandyKramer - 07 Sep 2002

Which is no help as that is exactly what we have w/o <p />. I see no extra blank lines in your results at all.

-- MathiasKoerber - 08 Sep 2002

Mathias,

Look again -- I put the results before the required markup, the results are:

• first item
  • second item

  • third item
    • fourth item

which is exactly what you wanted, I thought. PS: If you want more than one blank line between items, I'm not sure there's a way to do it -- in general, most browsers avoid showing multiple blank lines.

-- RandyKramer - 08 Sep 2002

I did look again, and still do not see it work correctly. I will try and reproduce what I see in these cases using verbatim:

First, here is your first example code:

   * first item<p />
      * second item<p />
      * third item<p />
         * fourth item<p />

Using Opera6 (on either Win2K or Linux) this turns out as

    * first item
           * second item
           * third item
                 * fourth item

On IE 5.5 (Win2K), this ends up as:

    * first item

        () second item

        () third item

               * fourth item

ie, with different bullets (solid and spare circles) and empty lines between each.

where the '*' represent bullets (diamonds in fact).

Your last example code looks like this:

* first item<p />
      * second item<p />
      * third item<p />
         * fourth item<p />

(note the wrongly positioned first item which turns up as text, not a bullet!)

And the results are

under Opera 6 (both Linux and IE 5.5):

* first item

    *    * second item
         * third item
               * fourth item

while IE shows this:

* first item

    *
         () second item

         () third item

                 * fourth item

The conclusions I draw are

1. this is somewhat browser dependent
2. IE does seem to honor the <p /> to insert empty lines
3. Both opera and IE create one additional bullet at the first level. In IE it´s on its own line, Opera seems to not like empty lines between bullets (<BR> seems to work though but is really ugly).

-- MathiasKoerber - 09 Sep 2002

I can't disagree with your conclusions -- it certainly does seem browser dependent -- works fine for me on Mozilla 0.9.8.

Looks like it's more stuff that could be added to BrowserFormattingIssues (or BrowserIssues).

-- RandyKramer - 09 Sep 2002

Use backslashes to escape newlines if you want empty lines in the code but not in the result:

   * first item \

      * second item \

      * third item \

         * fourth item

gives

• first item
  • second item
  • third item
    • fourth item

as result. I think, that is what you are looking for?

-- FrankThommen - 24 Sep 2002