This attribute controls the indentation within the output text produced
by the
astWrite function. It gives the increase in the indentation for each
level in the object heirarchy. If it is set to zero, no indentation will be
used. [3]
The default
value is zero for a basic Channel.
The FitsChan class ignores
this attribute.
The default value for an StcsChan is zero, which
causes the entire STC-S description is written out by a single invocation of the
sink function. The text supplied to the sink function will not contain any
linefeed characters, and each pair of adjacent words will be separated by a single
space. The text may thus be arbitrarily large and the
StcsLength attribute is
ignored.
If Indent is non-zero, then the text is written out via multiple calls to the sink
function, each call corresponding to a single "
line"
of text (although no line feed
characters will be inserted by AST). The complete STC-S description is broken into
lines so that:
-
the line length specified by attribute StcsLength is not exceeded
-
each sub-phrase (time, space, etc.) starts on a new line
-
each argument in a compound spatial region starts on a new line
If this causes a sub-phrase to extend to two or more lines, then the second and
subsequent lines will be indented by three spaces compared to the first line. In
addition, lines within a compound spatial region will have extra indentation to
highlight the nesting produced by the parentheses. Each new level of nesting will be
indented by a further three spaces.
The default value for an XmlChan is
zero, which results in no linefeeds or indentation strings being added to output text.
If any non-zero value is assigned to Indent, then extra linefeed and space characters
will be inserted as necessary to ensure that each XML tag starts on a new line, and
each tag will be indented by a further 3 spaces to show its depth in the containment
hierarchy.