[pmwiki-users] Some experiments with whitespace indentation

[Sivakatirswami]

I'll chime in here on behalf of the legions of "super naive users"  
for whom even

::

is "SCARY!"

and who will continue forever to use spaces to indent text no matter  
how much our magazine's layout editor fumes over it when he gets  
rough drafts of forms built by those for whom setting tab stop is  
from another planet.

I have actually watched over the shoulders of one of our staff as he  
painstakingly lined up elements in an ad, using spaces... feeling so  
proud when he got it right. I was grinding my teeth, biting my tongue  
from saying "gee why don't you just set tabs in the paragraph  
stylesheet and you are done!" because, well, for this type of person,  
"it just isn't gonna happen."

Patrick's got it right, and thanks to his core PMwiki philosophy,  
this works for me:

"A1: It's what authors tend to naturally.  In fact, look at how
you indented the text under the "1." and "3." in the questions
you sent in the email... :-)

A2: The markup ends up looking like the resulting output."

As for the issue of white space being fragile..well those who use  
spaces to do indentation already know this   and are quite used to  
twiddling with their spaces to get it right, and to them this is just  
part of "typesetting"  ..as indicated above by the one who uses  
spaces for text alignment even in complex layouts, but it applies  
even to "Mary Jane" when she fusses to get two  indented lines to  
line up with three spaces... and is happy when they do... i.e. to her  
it's' not "fragile" its just "oops.. I didn't put enough spaces...how  
careless of me... I;ll just add one here. ahh. see it works now..."  .

So, again, Patrick *does* have an intuitive insight on this...  
(Auditorium full off super naive users stands and applauds...)

Sivakatirswami






On Oct 16, 2005, at 6:09 PM, Jonathan Scott Duff wrote:

>
> On Sun, Oct 16, 2005 at 10:29:57PM -0400, Neil Herber wrote:
>
>> At 2005-10-17  01:58 PM +1300, John Rankin is rumored to have said:
>>
>>> 5. Just an observation -- matching the exact number of spaces
>>>   seems a bit fragile; for example this is incorrect:
>>>
>>
>> This is more than just an observation - it is a massive  
>> understatement.
>>
>> Relying on white space for any kind of markup (indents, list
>> components, or preformatted text)  strikes me as one of the weakest
>> parts of PmWiki.
>>
>
> I have to say that my initial thought was that Patrick has been
> playing with Python lately or something.
>
> But, then I realized ...
>
> On Sun, Oct 16, 2005 at 08:40:15PM -0500, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Oct 17, 2005 at 01:58:41PM +1300, John Rankin wrote:
>>
>>> 3. What's the rationale for choosing spaces at the start
>>>    of a line over continuation markup at the end of the
>>>    previous line?
>>>
>>
>> A1: It's what authors tend to naturally.  In fact, look at how
>> you indented the text under the "1." and "3." in the questions
>> you sent in the email... :-)
>>
>> A2: The markup ends up looking like the resulting output.
>>
>
> And it just so happens that one of my favorite text manipulation tools
> (the perl module Text::Autoformat) formats numbered lists in just this
> manner. So, it would be mighty convienent if pmwiki suddenly honored
> this common convention so that I could then use Text::Autoformat when
> editing wiki pages just as I normally do when editing email.
>
> On Sun, Oct 16, 2005 at 10:29:57PM -0400, Neil Herber wrote:
>
>> If PmWiki is truly to be author friendly, then it needs to have  
>> markup
>> that is clear and unambiguous. Aligning spaces is too hit-or-miss.
>>
>
> Um ... then don't use this markup?  I don't think that Pm is
> suggesting this format to the exclusion of others; just that this
> would be an additional alternative (that's presumably mediated by a
> variable that the WikiAdmin can set).
>
> I think that the only people that will be confused are those that run
> across this markup accidently and are surprised by the results.  I
> also think that the odds of this happening are quite small.
>
> -Scott
> -- 
> Jonathan Scott Duff
> duff at pobox.com
>
> _______________________________________________
> pmwiki-users mailing list
> pmwiki-users at pmichaud.com
> http://host.pmichaud.com/mailman/listinfo/pmwiki-users
>