Inconsistency in Column order

[Alfa1]

Book Table of Content is in Columns reading from top to bottom.
Yet, Area listing is in Columns reading from left to right instead.

Why is there an inconsistency? The Books table of content approach seems much better / intuitive to me.

[pegasus]

While we did originally intend for the area index to read left-right, there is a technical limitation here if we decide to change it. When allowing 3 columns in anything, and making the columns responsive by reducing the number of columns at lower widths, the entries can get out of order when the width is too low (something I think you noticed in your related thread).

Organizing the entries in top-bottom lists requires knowing the number of columns ahead of time, or at least requires that the number of columns will always be an even number. For books, I believe the number of columns is maxed at 2, but I would need to look into that. And for categories, I believe there might be a bug, because I think that allows 3 columns too, which can cause ordering problems (and they are supposed to be alphabetical order).

So in order to make the columns flow top-bottom on the area index, we would probably need to increase the number of starting columns to 4. However, I would not consider the current behavior a bug, on this page anyway. There might be a bug on category pages.