Poking around in the Lists options in TextEdit, the text-editor / word-processor that comes with every Mac, I was baffled by this drop-down box. What might it mean to “Prepend enclosing list marker”?
Prepend, I immediately discovered, is unmentioned in TextEdit’s Help file, which has little to say about lists at all. The word appears in neither the Mac’s New Oxford American Dictionary nor Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate. In Webster’s Third New International, the word means “consider, premeditate.” It’s the Oxford English Dictionary for the win, supplementing the word’s older meanings — “To weigh up mentally, ponder, consider; to premeditate” — with a more recent one: “trans. To add at the beginning, to prefix, prepose; esp. to add or append (a character, string, file, etc.) at the front of an existing string, file, etc.”
Further digging: Apple’ documentation says that
NSTextListPrependEnclosingMarker “Specifies that a nested list should include the marker for its enclosing superlist before its own marker.” One software developer notes, dryly, “We are confident that someone will find this useful.”
Well, I have: I’ve made a post about it. But I’ve made various lists, with and without the box checked, and I still cannot figure out what an enclosing list marker is and what difference prepending one might make. I wonder if any TextEdit user does.
Update, 10:39 a.m.: Someone does! An explanation may be found in the comments. Thanks, Arne.
comments: 4
Apparently it means that when you create a nested list, and you tick the 'prepend etc' box, the outer list's 'prefixes' get prepended to the items in the nested list.
See example http://stukjewebgebeuren.nl/spul/OSX_Textedit-List_styles.png
Thanks for the link, Arne. You’ve made clear what no one else on the Internet seems to make clear.
To get something like the linked image, I used the outline function (Option + Tab) and then added numbers and letters. Is there another way to create a nested list?
To get the nested list from the example image, you'll have to use the "Lists" pull-down menu on the ruler. I wish I could find a way to default to a Harvard-style outline rather than just the bullet points, or at least find a way to change the style with the keyboard rather than the mouse, but that appears to be beyond the ken of TextEdit.
Yes, TextEdit is a bit clunky. An outline (or “list,” on TE’s terms) of any complexity would seem to require a lot of by-hand work.
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