Attached to this bug report, is - A DocBook XML source file - An XSL:FO file generated from the DocBook XML source file, using the DocBook XSLT style sheets - A PDF file generated from the XSL:FO file using FOP 0.20.5 The DocBook XML source file uses nested <variablelist> elements, containing terms and their descriptions. In the generated PDF, the description is indented wrt. to the term in the top level <variablelist>, but not in the nested <variablelist> (the terms and their description have the same indentation). The reason is that FOP doesn't use the margin-left="0.25in" value in the nested fo:block elements in the XSL:FO file. The value of this property should be taken as relative to the containing block, but it isn't.
Created attachment 9960 [details] DocBook XML source file containing nested <variablelist> elements.
Created attachment 9961 [details] XSL:FO file generated from DocBook XML example with nested <variablelist> elements.
Created attachment 9962 [details] PDF file showing missing description indentation in nested <variablelists>
I am seeing a bug that is probably related to this one. It suggests to me that inheritance is not operating properly for list-blocks, at least for spacing and possibly in general. The scenario I am seeing is as follows: Given <fo:list-item-body start-indent="body-start()"> <fo:block> ... </fo:block> </fo:list-item-body> The fo:block will indent as expected -- that is, it will appear at the indentation position that is expected of the list-item-body. If, however, a start-indent is specified for the fo:block: <fo:list-item-body start-indent="body-start()"> <fo:block start-indent="0.25in"> ... </fo:block> </fo:list-item-body> then the fo-block is indented **relative to the indentation of the containing <fo:list-block> I have not tried it, but it would be interesting to see what the effect would be of specifying <fo:block indent="0">. I haven't looked at the code, but my suspicion is that either (a) the start-indent inheritance processing within FOP has a bug of some sort, or (b) the XSL-FO specification got the inheritance specification wrong. At the moment, I'm leaning toward FOP as the culprit. BTW, this problem is not in any way docbook specific. It's purely a fop issue.
Cf. bug 31537 : http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=31537
Fixed in FOP 0.94 and probably earlier versions
batch transition pre-FOP1.0 resolved+fixed bugs to closed+fixed