Re: [Docutils-users] How to keep paragraphs or table rows together

[R. D. <rdi...@ya...>]

> as this, keeping paragraphs and tables together, is a layout
> problem and therefore is depending on the output format,
> it actually is nothing docutils, or AsciiDoc could or should do.
> [...]

I do not understand this point of view. This is a basic feature. Without it, documents look unprofessional.


Even CSS, arguably designed primarily for screen usage, offers more control. See "page-break-inside: avoid", which you can add inside HTML. When the browser renders the page on the screen, it ignores it. When it prints it, or generates PDFs, it honours it. And that is independent of the output format.

docutils or AsciiDoc should offer some sort of standard mark-up for this. Even if it is in a subset considered "simple layout". The distinction between plain information and layout gets a little blurry at this point. One could think of "keep together" as a kind of "these elements are semantically closer".


The whole point of such markup languages is that you have a single source for many different output formats. However, PDF documents and e-book readers have pages, and still are very popular output formats. If you need to use different tags depending on the output format for such simple matters, the promise of output format independence breaks.


Best regards,
  rdiez