Talk:Description

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Revision as of 16:55, 24 May 2006 by Adityam (talk | contribs) (→‎Multi paragraph descriptions: forgot to state my question)
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It's not at all clear to me what a "description" is, exactly, or what one would use such a thing for. Can someone write a bit of text describing that?

Also, the "bla bla bla" looks a bit ugly; this space could be better used for random sentences sort of elaborating on what a description is, or at least providing (silly) examples of what one might put in one. --Brooks 23:59, 3 Sep 2005 (UTC)

I tend to think of it like this: if an array of values is an enumeration list, then a hash of values is a description list. I'm not feeling creative enough today to come up with new example text, but I'll fix the Todo now. --Taco 08:39, 4 Sep 2005 (UTC)
Done; thanks! (It occurred to me that, since this was a basic LaTeX command, I could just look it up in the LaTeX documentation.) --Brooks
I'm not sure my solution is correct, because if it was this simple why ask? Not quite knowing what the latex package does is a bit of a problem while answering (not for the first time). --Taco 08:55, 4 Sep 2005 (UTC)
I don't know; I may try that out on my system at some point. Perhaps the LaTeX package cited is smart enough to wrap multiple lines around longer labels, or something? Or maybe it's just a case of "LaTeX has hardwired commands and packages to change them, while ConTeXt has commands with lots of options that the user can change" again. --Brooks 19:43, 4 Sep 2005 (UTC)

Multi paragraph descriptions

Why does the example have \vskip 1em? This looks ugly.

To have a ConTextish (is that a word?) soln, I want to change that to \blank[1em].

However, I think that using \\start ... \stop is better for multiparagraph descriptions.

\definedescription[descr][
  headstyle=bold,style=normal,align=left,location=hanging,
  width=broad,margin=1cm]

\setupwhitespace[1em] %Because the example had \vskip 1em

\starttext

\startdescr{Para} This is a shorter item label, and some text that talks about it.
   The text is wrapped into a paragraph, with successive lines indented.
   
   This is another paragraph under the "Para" item.
\stopdescr

\stoptext

Is there any reason why this is not used? I am not 100% sure that \blank or a empty line have no side effects. If there is no objection, I will make the change.

--Aditya 18:40, 24 May 2006 (CEST)