General ⇒ \caption und \item too wide in self-defined environment

[raimund]

Hi,

I defined myself the following experiment-environment:

% definition of my own ``experiment'' environment
\newcounter{experimentCounter}
\renewcommand{\theexperimentCounter}{\arabic{chapter}.\arabic{section}.
\arabic{experimentCounter}}
\newenvironment{experiment}[3] {%
\setlength{\parindent}{0 pt}%
\sf%
\bigskip%
\stepcounter{experimentCounter}%
\refstepcounter{experimentCounter}%
\textbf{Experiment~\theexperimentCounter~(#1)}%
\setlength{\leftskip}{0.5cm}\setlength{\rightskip}{0.5cm}%
\par%
\textbf{Description:} #2%
\par%
\textbf{Expectation:} #3%
\par%
\textbf{Observation: }}{\normalfont

}

Basically, experiments are typeset a bit more narrow (see leftskip and rightskip). Apart from two excepions, I have no problems with this environment: only figure captions and \items of the itemize environment do not stick to the leftskip and rightskip settings of my environment. Is there a solution to this?

Any help is appreciated.

Cheers,
Raimund

[balf]

Did you try to replace:
\setlength{\leftskip}{0.5cm}\setlength{\rightskip}{0.5cm}%
with:
\everypar{\setlength{\leftskip}{0.5cm}\setlength{\rightskip}{0.5cm}}%

Another solution would be to use
\advance \hsize by -0.5cm (check the syntax)\hangindent=0.5cm\hangafter=0
(and perhaps also an \everypar command).

BA

[raimund]

Hi,

thanks for the suggestions, but both solutions did not work:

1)\everypar{...}% simply repeats the left- and rightskip for each paragrph, i.e., with each new paragraph the textwidth shrinks.

2) \advance \hsize by -0.5cm (check the syntax)\hangindent=0.5cm\hangafter=0

This can be used to replace my current \left- and rightskip code, but it behaves just the same for items and captions.

So far I found one solution for items (no very elegant): I simply put a copy of the \left- and rightskips after \begin{itemize}. For some reason this does not appear to work for \caption though...

Cheers,
Raimund

[balf]

Maybe you should try to consider your environment as being of type 'theorem'. The ntheorem package has, among other parameters, a \leftmargin and a \rightmargin which might do the trick?

B.A.