Pandoc 2.4 regression: (@) and odt

[AugustH]

Sample:

text

(@) text

    text

text

compile with:
pandoc -f markdown test.md -o test.odt

output changed with pandoc 2.4 (on linux mint, libreoffice 6.0.6): the numbered paragraph is indented

[mb21]

Output changed from what version? Isn't the new output better?

Maybe this was this change back in 2017: 34b9bee#diff-75ef96f1820e7e194afee0dd28277dd6 ?

[AugustH]

sorry, change was from 2.3 to 2.4 -- and the output looks different from latex/pdf and docx. And it doesn't look good either :-(

Example from one of my documents:

vs.

[jgm]

This probably has to do with the following changelog entry:

  * Text.Pandoc.Writers.OpenDocument: Improve bullet/numbering
    alignment (#4385). This change eliminates the large gap we used
    to have between bullet and text, and also ensures that numbers
    in numbered lists will be right-aligned.

See #4385 and commit f82d574.
Needs more fine tuning, it appears.

[jgm]

% diff test2221/content.xml test24/content.xml 
9c9,11
<         <style:list-level-properties text:space-before="0.0in" text:min-label-width="0.4in" />
---
>         <style:list-level-properties text:list-level-position-and-space-mode="label-alignment" fo:text-align="right">
>           <style:list-level-label-alignment text:label-followed-by="listtab" text:list-tab-stop-position="0.5in" fo:text-indent="-0.1in" fo:margin-left="0.5in" />
>         </style:list-level-properties>

where 2221 is pandoc 2.2.2.1, 24 is pandoc 2.4.

[jgm]

Fixed by #5095, I believe.

[AugustH]

just checked with 2.5: as bad as 2.4 -- should the fix the commit be in pandoc 2.5 ?

[jgm]

Yes. The fix is in. Here's what I see in LibreOffice:

The numbered list is indented, yes. But just like in LibreOffice's defaults: marker to 0.25 in, Body to 0.5in.

The other alignment issues (demonstrated in the screenshot you uploaded above) are fixed, or should be. If not, give more details.

[AugustH]

But the indentation is a change -- there was no indentation up to 2.3. And neither the pdf/latex output nor docx output has this indentation. And just for the records: the (@) is a "numbered example lists", not a normal numbered list.

Ok i could live with the change if there a way to change this via a reference.odt file. Is there such a way?

[jgm]

It would be easy to remove the outer 0.25" of indentation so that lists start at the margin. @pyssling what would you think of that?

[pyssling]

@AugustH could you be more clear on which of your examples corresponds to which version?

My personal view is that ODT should look like a libreoffice document.

Could we clarify what exactly the remaining issues are? Is it only that the first list level is indented?

This is, I'm quite sure, not configurable via a template or reference. Ideally we would eventually add support for CSS on the ODT writer. The XML tags are very similar to HTML in their semantics, so this should be doable.

[jgm]

Nils Carlson <notifications@github.com> writes:

This is, I'm quite sure, not configurable via a template or reference. Ideally we would eventually add support for CSS on the ODT writer. The XML tags are very similar to HTML in their semantics, so this should be doable.

This would be great. If you could offer some examples, perhaps we could move towards this. I didn't write the opendocument writer, and I've never liked the way it hardcodes styles for everything, but I don't know the format, really.

[AugustH]

Some screenshots
Odt pandoc 2.3 number is left

Odt pandoc 2.4 -- oops

Odt pandoc 2.5 -- number moved to the right side, much more indentation

as a reference latex (unchanged between versions)

[pyssling]

@AugustH I see the conundrum. I think the answer to this is that the ODT writer is naive. The (1) is a wide enumerator, so the space before the first text ends up being quite small. Furthermore, the font sizes are not comparable, I think this exaggerates the effect a bit.

I think the 2.5 behavior is preferable to both the 2.3 and 2.4 behavior, it is the closest to the latex behavior. We could do some micro adjustments, but I think that they would make other use-cases uglier. The ODT writer is simply not dynamic in the same way as the latex layout engine.

[jgm]

Nils Carlson <notifications@github.com> writes:

I think the 2.5 behavior is preferable to both the 2.3 and 2.4 behavior, it is the closest to the latex behavior. We could do some micro adjustments, but I think that they would make other use-cases uglier. The ODT writer is simply not dynamic in the same way as the latex layout engine.

One adjustment I considered was making the distances bigger (say, 0.3 or 0.35 in instead of 0.25). This would give better results for (1) but make the space a little too wide for bullets. With some fancier coding, one could have different distances for different sorts of lists, but that does complicate things a lot. What I'd really like is the ability to use styles that can be adjusted in the reference.odt.

[AugustH]

another problem with the version 2.5 odt-output: it breaks for "bigger" numbers (10).

could someone reopen this issue?

[jgm]

We can increase the width, as noted above, but this will make bullets look worse.

[pyssling]

I would like to see what libreoffice does. I have tried to replicate that behaviour, but if this is what it does then that's not good enough.

I'll try to create a libreoffice document today.

[pyssling]

@AugustH I replicated this behaviour in Libreoffice, it behaves the exact same way. I can file a bug on libreoffice and see what they say, my guess is that (10) overflows some buffer where the next tab stop becomes the correct one.

[AugustH]

maybe this is a problem in Libreoffice. But with pandoc 2.3 the same input created a odt-file which looked much better (screenshot from Libreoffice): much more to the left (the gray line is the left margin), enough space for the bigger numbers

[pyssling]

Yes, I see what you mean. I'm wondering what the correct behaviour should be. I agree this looks good for numbered paragraphs like this, but for a more traditional list of one line or two in point form this would look odd. This may simply be a different use-case than the traditional list.

[mb21]

I suppose we could make the indent dependent on whether the list marker is >9 (for ordered lists). Not sure how easy that is to implement...

[jgm]

The code is currently all under the assumption that you can figure out indent levels by calculating the degree of nesting. This assumes constant indent for each type of list. We'd have to complicate things to have different indents for different lists. Mauro Bieg <notifications@github.com> writes:

…

I suppose we could make the indent dependent on whether the list marker is >9 (for ordered lists). Not sure how easy that is to implement...

[AugustH]

I fixed it for me by replacing the fo:text-indent="-0.25in" to fo:text-indent="-0.5in" in the resulting odt file (content.xml).

Idea: i looked at the code: the offset is set in OpenDocument.hs in listLevelStyle. Is it possible to add an if here or actually in the calling orderedListLevelStyle: if the style d is TwoParens, the format is 1 and the level (length ls) is 1: then the indent should be changed -- actually changing it on the first two conditions would fix it for larger numbers.