Block quotes in numbered lists that don't interrupt numbering

Question

I am working on a book that has a long lists of paragraphs that are numbered as in a numbered list. Within several of the paragraphs are blockquotes, and one in particular has a blockquote followed by a resumptive paragraph (i.e. no indent, resuming after a quote).

When such breaks in paragraphs in the list occur, the numbering for my list starts over at 1. I should note that I am using ScribeNet to convert our books from marked up InDesign or Word documents, so you can't just put <li></li> tags around things. Instead, what Scribe wants is for each paragraph to have a paragraph class specified in the CSS such as <p class="nl"> where nl is shorthand for numbered list and points to .nl in my CSS file.

I could probably just overcome this problem by using standard HTML list conventions, but I am uncertain if this is considered "best practice" within the e-book community. Is there a way to do this just using Scribe's format?

Answer 1

I found my answer. Several things were being done incorrectly.

First, ScribeNet's conversion process likes to close non-linking anchor tags with a /> instead of </a>. E-books read this with no problem, but the basic HTML gets squirrely and starts thinking there has been an interruption in the numbering of the list. Thus, any page breaks that occurred in my original print book and that were marked up in my HTML needed to be closed properly with </a>.

From there it was just a simple matter of setting <p class="nlf"> (or nl or nll where nlf represents "numbered list first", nl is "numbered list", and nll is "numbered list last") to have the appropriate margins and text indents in CSS (which you can sort out for yourself based on what format you'd like). But the clincher was to use:

display: list-item; list-style: decimal in my CSS for these 3 class elements. What this does is display a paragraph as if it were a list element, and then look to the list-style to determine how the list is marked, which is in this case with cardinal numbers followed by a period/full-stop.

You can mess around with various list styles such as disc, decimal, lower-roman', etc. But there are also two modifiers,insideandoutside`. You can call them like this:

list-style: lower-latin inside

What this will do is go through the Latin alphabet in cardinal order from a to z for each subsequent paragraph in the list, and then rather than inserting a large whitespace (equivalent to a 'tab') between the period/full-stop after the Latin letter and the start of the content of the paragraph, it will instead indent the list-marker and tuck it in closer to the text. This is nice if you are producing, for example, multiple-choice questions at the end of a chapter/unit of a text book. Very handy!