Table lists

[Oscar Levin]

I ran into an interesting document structure I thought I would share.  See the attached image.  This is a university required table that needs to be on all our general education courses, so I need to put it into my pretext syllabus.  As you will see, the table contains a numbered list of learning outcomes, one outcome per row (some rows have multiple subitems).  It is important that each item is in its own row since these need to be checked off (never mind that this example has all of them checked).  

Now, I think I know what I can do to mimic this example (I'm thinking a column for the top-level numbers, then ol with marker set appropriately for the sublist).  But this does make me think about our oft-requested "list continuation".  I don't yet understand what being able to author the nth element of a list in a list-like format really means, but wanted to record this as another datapoint.

[Charilaos Skiadas]

I think for this use case a natural (to me at least) semantic structure for that would be to allow an attribute on a list that contains the xml:id of another list, indicating that this list continues that other list. I believe that should be relatively easy to detect at the XSL level. The question then becomes: do further lists simply all refer to that first list, or does each carry an id in order to be continued, which sounds much more awkward.

Or a simpler approach might be to allow lists to have some sort of “list-name” attribute, then all lists with the @list-name form a single list counter-wise?

I’m probably late in these lists discussions, so perhaps those are all things considered already.

Haris

Charilaos Skiadas
Department of Mathematics
Hanover College

On Aug 19, 2025, at 6:12 PM, Oscar Levin <oscar...@gmail.com> wrote:

I ran into an interesting document structure I thought I would share.  See the attached image.  This is a university required table that needs to be on all our general education courses, so I need to put it into my pretext syllabus.  As you will see, the table contains a numbered list of learning outcomes, one outcome per row (some rows have multiple subitems).  It is important that each item is in its own row since these need to be checked off (never mind that this example has all of them checked).  

Now, I think I know what I can do to mimic this example (I'm thinking a column for the top-level numbers, then ol with marker set appropriately for the sublist).  But this does make me think about our oft-requested "list continuation".  I don't yet understand what being able to author the nth element of a list in a list-like format really means, but wanted to record this as another datapoint.

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<LACslos.png>

[Rob Beezer]

Very interesting, Oscar. Thanks. I think.

An ordered list should be a sequence of things that have order. Like a recipe.
An unordered list should be things without an order. Like the ingredients in a
recipe that form your shopping list.

The sublists here (a, b, c, ...) do not really seem to have any order to me.
Maybe the one-element sublists vacuously have order?

Maybe the overall numbered list has order? Or maybe not? I could argue either way.

So why have ordered lists at all? I would guess so people using this can say,
"Yes, we do 3(b) in class." So I think a list is being used as a way to get
identifiers? I would think our #outcomes element would be the right place to
start. Which is really just a dressed-up #ol (and #ul, #dl), iirc.

This is definitely not a #tabular in the sense we have tried to restrict its use
to. (Array of data, for ease in locating any one entry.)

And is it a form? Not sure who is ticking off boxes and when. Could the boxes
be replicated on each top-level numbered item? We certainly don't want to be in
the business of making forms.

> does make me think about our oft-requested "list continuation".

It makes me think of my recent rant about proofs, detached proofs, solution
proofs and foonotes. Letting a list ramble all over the place (despite Haris'
good suggestion) is exactly the sort of thing that is going to lead to all sorts
of problems and hard-to-maintain code. "Oft-requested" is a reason to consider
something seriously, but I'm going to try to stick to the simplicity of natural
markup that leads to good code.

Rob

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[Oscar Levin]

> This is definitely not a #tabular in the sense we have tried to restrict its use
to. (Array of data, for ease in locating any one entry.)

Thinking about this more, and actually authoring it, I think that this really is a tabular, it's just that the contents of the first cell in the row is really repeating a numbered item from some list, with both its number and its content.  Think about what we do with solutions divisions.  Imagine we wanted a table of the odd exercises, and their statements, correlated with the number of students that attempted each problem (so clearly a table of this data is appropriate).  

This is in no way a suggestion that we should offer this functionality, but for the purposes of describing the semantics of a document, "This is the number of contents of a particular list item" is a thing of some sort.  For example, 

"Recall the third group theory axiom: 

    A3. For every element g in the group, there is an element h such that gh = hg = e

Notice that A3 only makes sense when <xref ref="group-axiom-a2"/> is present"

The tricky thing in my original example is that the original list is not present anywhere in my document (it exists in some Colorado State Regulations).  So the only way I can think of authoring it is something like a bare <li> (not a child of ol/ul/dl) or maybe <lix marker="A3"><p>....</p></lix>.  Of course, this could be used to give something that looks like a numbered list with no assertions of orders of markers.

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[Rob Beezer]

Understanding this a bit better. But not like I live in Colorado nor have I
tried authoring this...

A PreTeXt #list with Colorado's 5 items and sub-items. #introduction says this
comes from the state.

Then a #table/#tabular for your course. Row headings are the 5 numbers. Column
headings are "Class", .... Binary data, checked or not checked.

In other words, there are two things, slightly separate. And you can get list
numbers as row headings with an "xref", though they are kinda ugly - 5.7.3:b.II.D.

Rob

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[Oscar Levin]

I ended up authoring this with hard coded numbers in the first cell of each row, but no right border to trick the eye into thinking this was part of the next cell.  Live example here:  Section: LAC Area 2/GtPathways Content and Competency Criteria.  Works for now, but I feel dirty.