fo: missing space after vertical simplelist

[petere]

Consider this example document:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE para PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.2//EN" "http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.2/docbookx.dtd">
<section>
  <title>foo</title>
  <para>
    text before
    <simplelist>
      <member>one</member>
      <member>two</member>
      <member>three</member>
    </simplelist>
    text after
  </para>
</section>

Process it using

xsltproc -o test.fo .../docbook-xsl/fo/docbook.xsl test.xml

The output for the simplelist results in a <fo:table> with space-before attributes but no space-after attributes, so there is vertical space between "text before" and the list/table, but not vertical space between the list/table and the "text after".

I think the resposible attribute set normal.para.spacing should also get some space-after attributes.

[bobstayton]

Adding space-after attributes to 'normal.para.spacing' could produce undesirable results for some users. The space between two blocks is taken as the maximum of a) the preceding block's space-after and b) the following block's space-before. If the preceding block is an ordinary para and has a space after, then the element that follows it cannot reduce the spacing below that amount with its space-before. The DocBook stylesheets took the design approach to let every element specify its space-before, since that is generally more important design-wise than space-after. Because normal.para.spacing is used in so many places, your case of a simple list within a para should not be used to override this general design principle.
I think a better solution would be to provide a specific attribute set for simplelist in vertical mode, so that you could add a space-after value for your purposes without messing with all the para spacing in the document.