Indenting entire sections of a page

Peter is on the right path here. Which RoboHelp version are you using? If it is RoboHelp 2020, I suggest that you leverage the sematic power of (X)HTML5 and use semantic elements like <article> and <section> for this purpose.

Example:

You could use <section> to wrap smaller parts of the content (e.g., heading + content belonging to this heading) into one section, and then <article> to wrap multiple sections into one article. You can use multiple sections and articles in one topic as you can see in the example.

In the CSS, you can then style it in any way you want, including indenting. E.g., like this:

article {
  /* left margin to the "parent element body */
  margin-left: 10px;
}

article section {
  /* Left margin for the first article child "section".
     Note that this sums up as 10 + 20 = 30 px from the body box.
  */
  margin-left: 20px;
}

article section section {
  /* Left margin for the first child section of a section.
     Note that this sums up as 10 + 20 + 20 = 50 px from the body box.
  */
  margin-left: 20px;
}

article section section section {
  /* Continue like this if you need to nest sections even deeper.
  */
  margin-left: 20px;
}

However, be thoughtful about indenting sections – keep mobile devices in mind. If you indent too much, it might become a very small section in width on a mobile device. You might want to introduce media queries and for mobile devices and then give a smaller or even no indent to them.

Regarding the heading levels (h1, h2, h3, etc.): General best practice is to reflect the content structure also in heading levels. That is, I would go for something like this:

<article>
  <h1>Title of the main article</h1>
  <section>
    <h2>Title of the first sub-section</h2>
    <p>Some content …</p>
    <section>
      <h3>Title of the first sub-sub-section</h3>
      <p>Some content …</p>
    </section>
  </section>
  <section>
    <h2>Title of the second sub-section</h2>
    <p>Some content …</p>
    <section>
      <h3>Title of the first sub-sub-section</h3>
      <p>Some content …</p>
      <section>
        <h4>Title of the first sub-sub-sub-section</h4>
        <p>Some content …</p>
      </section>
    </section>
  </section>
</article>

Hope that helps.

I believe the correct way would be to apply a div tag to indent everything up to the closing div tag. I have not been able to make that work but maybe you have a friendly developer who could help.

Meantime a borderless table with no content in the first column would provide a crude fix.

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