Closed Intelligent2013 closed 5 months ago
I am dealing with this issue right now for IEC in https://github.com/metanorma/metanorma-iec/issues/197
ISO/IEC DIR 2 as I recall it gives the ordering with alphabetic first as its prescription. But I will need to check how rigid that prescription is. The copy I just saw at IEC gives it as an illustration, but is not clear as to whether it is normative.
In this regard, we are hostage to the Word templates: recall that Word documents remain how draft documents are submitted to ISO and IEC. Word HTML makes it very difficult to change the style of ordered lists: it can only be done in CSS, and if the style template hasn't already defined a style for that numbering, a new style has to be defined on the fly. That style also needs to define the numbering of all its nested lists. https://github.com/metanorma/isodoc/issues/247 has been on hold for the past 4 years for that reason.
In fact, while Metanorma allows styles on lists, it explicitly removes them in postprocessing of Presentation XML, because of the difficulties they present with Word.
The IEC Word template does define two numbering styles, an alphabetic-first and an arabic-first. If the Word template for ISO does likewise, I can introduce some sort of styling toggle somewhere. If not, then it becomes a much bigger ask, though a global document default is feasible (I would propagate the variable into the preprocessing of the Word and HTML CSS.)
But I have not done anything for years on this, not only because it is difficult in Word HTML, but also because it is an semantically unmotivated inconsistency, of the kind that is easy to realise in Word, but which Metanorma by design makes hard and undesirable. The fact that one or two documents deviate from an alphabetic-first style is not to me sufficient reason to support it, especially if it is a stylistic quirk with no semantic motivation. These are self-indulgent whims that WYSIWYM is meant to do away with, not encourage...
I will look at the templates and latest ISO/IEC DIR 2 and get back to you.
Yes, ISO/IEC DIR 2 does not dictate that list numbering be alphabetic-first, but that's the only illustration it gives in https://www.iso.org/sites/directives/current/part2/index.xhtml#_idTextAnchor329
https://www.iso.org/ISO-house-style.html says that
The default order for a numbered list is a), b), c) for the first level; 1), 2), 3) for the second level; i), ii), iii) for the third level; and a), b), c) for the fourth level.
"Default" of course does not mean "mandated".
There is a split between Word templates.
I think providing this level of flexibility is a mistake, but the DIS structure provides me a way of realising it, without being hostage to Word CSS inflexibility, and that is not the case in general for Word lists.
So I am going to remove the constraints on list numbering which I have put on ISO; I will retain them for ISO, IEC, JIS, as flavours inheriting from ISO, because they do not insert labels manually on lists, so they are still subject to the constraints of Word CSS.
I will implement flexible labelling of lists in ISO Word using the DIS template. I will not implement it in ISO Word using the draft template, because the draft template uses the CSS that forced this constraint to begin with. If I ever do implement a workaround for https://github.com/metanorma/isodoc/issues/247, I will revisit that, but I do not believe that drafts are as important to render nicely.
@opoudjis thank you!
Source issue: https://github.com/metanorma/metanorma-iso/issues/1134#issuecomment-2006950974
Sometimes, the first level ordered list uses the arabic numbering in the original ISO documents. But metanorma-iso creates alphabetic lists.
Questions:
type
https://www.metanorma.org/author/topics/blocks/lists/#specification-of-list-type, but I don't sure that it's working at all)The source adoc: https://github.com/metanorma/mn-samples-iso-private/tree/adoc_19152_1_2024