if I create a page with no margins or padding and have a block with text this correctly appears butted up to the left. if I create a table after that text again with the table having 0 margins or padding it is also butted to the left. however when I set the margin-left of the block to 10pt the text moves out by 10pt while the left of the table moves out double that. it is always double, this is also the case if margin-left of the table. this appears to be the case just since version 0.9 it can be currently worked around by putting tables in separate blocks with the margin-left set to half of that of the rest of the page. Ken.
This effect is due to indent inheritance, as I call it. I've documented the whole topic on our Wiki: http://wiki.apache.org/xmlgraphics-fop/IndentInheritance In contrast to many commercial implementations we've chosen to closely follow the specification which, unfortunately, may have certain side-effects. The specialist group at the W3C is aware of the issue. There are two solutions here: 1. Spec-conformant solution: margins are mapped to the start-indent and end-indent properties. The latter two properties are inherited. If you cross a reference area boundary you will the see the effect you describe unless you reset start-indent and end-indent to 0. For a table, this can conventiently be done on the table-body, so it fans out to all child elements. For more detail, please see the Wiki page indicated above. 2. Non-spec-conformant solution: I've recently added an option to FOP that lets you activate an alternative set of rules concerning indent inheritance. These rules try to mimic the behaviour implemented by some commercial FO implementations. With these rules enabled you don't get the strange side-effect as long as you work with margins only because the margins are not automatically propagated to the start-indent and end-indent properties. Documentation on how to turn this on will be available shortly. I've already written it, but it's not yet published. The fix for that is found in FOP Trunk (available via SVN only). Please note that enabling this feature makes FOP behave differently from what the specification says it should do. I've recently asked the W3C SG about their updated opinion on the matter: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/xsl-editors/2005OctDec/0026.html
batch transition to closed remaining pre-FOP1.0 resolved bugs