[XeTeX] table indentation

[Michiel Kamermans]

Hi Ross,
> It's not clear whether you want all the tables to be indented,  or not 
> indented.
Basically, I wanted "indented by any value (allowing 0 if need be), 
because it is a table indentation properly, not a paragraph 
indentation", so I took Carsten's suggestion of a new environment, but 
made it issue a \noindent command, followed by an 
\hspace{\tabularindent} (with the tabularindent value set in the 
preamble). That way it ignores paraphing indentation and just always 
uses the tabular indentation value.

> Since you seem to be complaining about some non-indented ones, it 
> would seem that you actually want a consistent indent. What is 
> happening then is that the first paragraph in a section is normally 
> not indented, whereas subsequent ones are indented. If this is 
> relatively rare, why not just use \indent for those few cases? (It'll 
> serve as an indicator that there really should have been some text 
> there.) 
The main problem with manual tweaks is that I have a tool chain that 
does not allow manual tweaking of the source code prior to compilation 
to PDF - the source gets built of a set of text files hosted online, and 
turned into (xe)latex source via several scripts. While technically it 
is possible to detect whether a section has no text in it and goes 
straight to a table, that wouldn't "unlink" paragraph and tabular 
indenting, it would only solve that specific instance of a problem 
related to linked indentation, so the real solution had to involve 
unlinking the indentation of paragraphs and the indentation of tables. 
The custom environment unlinks the two nicely.

- Mike