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

[Guenter M. <mi...@us...>]

On 2018-08-30, R. Diez via Docutils-users wrote:

>> 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.

It ist, however, a basic *layout* feature for page-based layouts.

> Even CSS, arguably designed primarily for screen usage, offers more
> control. See "page-break-inside: avoid", which you can add inside HTML.

CSS is a layout description language. You can use CSS with Docutils to style
the output accordingly.





> 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".

There are several ways to convey the semantic of "keep together" in
reStructuredText. It depends on your special need to find out which is
best suited.

> 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.

Indeed. However, you still need different stylesheets for the conversion of
the semantic information in the rST source into a layout in, e.g.
LaTeX-generated PDF or HTML for an ebook reader.

Sincerely,

Günter