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Re: A case for artifacting bullets in unordered lists in PDFs

for

From: Olaf Drümmer
Date: Jul 23, 2013 3:50PM

Hi Jonathan,

Am 23 Jul 2013 um 23:31 schrieb Jonathan Metz < <EMAIL REMOVED> >:

>>> you can easily have lists without a label character in from of the list
>>> items.
>
>
> [Me] Hi Olaf. I¹m having difficulty understanding you here. Can you
> extrapolate this for me?

I'll simulate one here (the 'lines' are just that indicate lines to be draw as a box, or maybe a pastel colour background rectangle):



Three things you need for a cup of tea:

--------------------------------
| a cup |
--------------------------------

--------------------------------
| tea leaves |
--------------------------------

--------------------------------
| hot water |
--------------------------------



Would you agree there is simply a list with three items? But there is no bullet character or something like that. Lists are lists when they are intended/designed/perceived as lists. There visual cues beyond bullet characters that can make people see/understand they have a list in front of them.


A very typical way to do this is actually on title pages of magazines: they have lists of text that point to the articles, but in many cases they do not use bullet characters. As an example look at the Macworld title page shown at this URL:

http://www.iphoneography.com/journal/2010/7/29/macworld-magazine-cover-shot-on-an-iphone.html

there is a 3 item list under the iPhone 4 tagline - and it uses spacing only, no bullet character or similar.


Olaf