Vote! User input needed! Left/right adjustment of sidebars / figures

[davidg-sil]

In certain circumstances, it might be useful to be able to shift a sidebar or image, particularly one that's nominally left or right-aligned e.g.:

• Outdent an image or title block into space normally used for marginal verses
• Move the ISBN barcode on the cover so that it's in a more pleasing position.
• Position illustrations (e.g. in a portion of indented text), aligned with text-margins rather than page margin.

At the moment there isn't a control for this.

Options:

1. Use existing stylesheet entry \FirstLineIndent. This is not used for figures or sidebars and is sort of margin-related, though it is a bit cryptic.
2. Use existing stylesheet entries \LeftMargin / \RightMargin This would work for sidebars, but for figures the left and right margins are used to adjust the caption, not the figure. Allowing two parameters to be used implies that there is some kind of adjustment of the figure / sidebar width. How this interacts with other parameters would need defining.
3. Make the position code even more complex and harder to understand. e.g. cr3.4 For right-aligned cutout, 3.4 lines below anchor-point becomes cr3.4@-10.3, indicating that the picture should be indented -10.3pt I.e extend into the margin 10.3pt.
4. Use existing stylesheet entry \SpaceBeside. Currently this is used for cutouts to determine how much extra space should be left to separate the text from the sidebar/figure. Using it to move the figure in other situations would be possible, but it would make it impossible to indent a indent or outdent anything in a cutout.
5. Invent a new stylesheet entry, such as \MarginAdjust or \EdgeAdjust

Other considerations:

• As long as there's no interaction with other options, it might be that the user interface could be made clever enough to hide / reposition the name of the parameter, so the name in the stylesheet might eventually be irrelevant except for those manually adjusting the stylesheet.
• The position code is already too complicated
• Sidebars get used to make the covers. To help new users avoid destroying their cover layout, I expect that this parameter will have no effect on sidebars that are full-page. There are already enough parameters they can use if they really want ugly covers.

Please add any thoughts/comments/ideas and votes below!

[davidg-sil]

Closed due to lack of debate.