[pmwiki-users] improved markup for floating images...?

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Wed, Jul 27, 2005 at 09:12:57AM -0500, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> One problem I see is that 
> it could substantially change image formatting and location for 
> existing PmWiki 2.0.beta pages.  It wouldn't cause things to 
> completely break -- i.e., things would still look okay, but
> it wouldn't be exactly as authors had intended.  How big a problem
> is this...?

The problem of migration seems to be *much* less if we don't go with the
idea that images at the beginning of a line automatically float.  If
we do this then the only difference is that such markups don't
automatically inline to the next line of text, which actually seems to
confuse people as much as it helps.

FWIW, this would also be consistent with Wikipedia -- images in 
Wikipedia don't float without having some sort of option listed
that causes them to float.

Thus we probably still need some sort of wikistyle shortcut that
indicates "float right with margins", which brings us pretty close
to where this whole thread started.  :-)  But I think we have some
clearer answers now...

First, the notion of "image" is now gone from my request for a good
shortcut name; instead of "float image right with margin" I'm now 
looking for a shortcut name that implies "float right with margin",
as it can be used for more than just images.

Second, the %float=...% wikistyle is being added to the core distribution.
The reason for not just using %float=right% to mean "float right
with margin" is that it's a little long to type, and by itself it
doesn't supply the "with margin" part.

Ultimately I want an author to be able to write

    %xyz% Attach:image.jpg

where "xyz" is something that indicates that the image (or text) is 
going to move to a margin, and that text will wrap nicely around it.
FWIW, %left% and %right% are currently used to mean something else so 
it might be nice to avoid breaking those if we can.  

Lastly, any line that begins with an image of some sort will
end up in its own block for formatting purposes.  

Pm