[pmwiki-users] Markon, markoff

[Pico]

Mike Bishop <mbishop <at> mtaonline.net> writes:

> 
>        (No, not the secret of Korean martial arts)
> 
>        Given--
> 
>           o Sites that are mainly CMS like;
> 
>           o Several editors contributing pages;
> 
>           o Comments, Forums, etc., as the main way for non editors
>             to communicate.
> 
>        then most users adding comments will not be familiar with
>        wiki editing convention.
> 
>        Most markup is unlikely to be entered accidentally by casual
>        users.  The exception--indenting lines to start a paragraph.
>        This has the predictable result of very long lines of "as is"
>        text which can blow up skins in certain cases.
> 
>        Disabling "^ " markup works, of course, but then denies authors
>        the use of a leading space to indent list text (a nice
>        feature).
> 
>        What would be convenient would be an option to disable
>        markup for eg., commentbox, commentboxplus etc., but allow
>        it elsewhere.  Editors would still be able to edit comment
>        text with markup, but the casual user would not be upset to
>        see their words of wisdom formatted in an unexpected fashion.
> 
>        Apologies if this has been beaten to death elsewhere, I
>        couldn't find any obvious references.
> 

I use the new >>white-space=pre<< wikistyle and incorporate it into styled
output variables provided with the Cookbook/CommentPlus recipe in my config.php
file, like this:

$MPItemStartFmt = ">>messageitem white-space=pre<<\n";

The problem with that approach is that the font can change pretty drastically
when a leading whitespace is encountered (because the white-space wikistyle uses
the default skin font, which is typically proportional, while the leading
whitespace rule typically triggers a change to a monospaced font.  The answer to
that is to also specify a monospaced font in the message style, like this:

$MPItemStartFmt = ">>messageitem white-space=pre font-family=monospace<<"; 

If the results are not good enough on the skin you use, you may want to
experiment with specific font families that are monospaced, such as courier and
courier new.  I ended up having to try many alternatives.  When you look in the
skin files you can locate the font family, but it is ussually an array, and so
you will need to experiment to find the best match (which may not be the best
match for other viewers with different font families available to  them).*  In
the end, I found that the courier new made a pretty good (but not great) match.

Here are some references for related discussions and pages.

PITS/00773
Cookbook/CommentBoxPlus
Cookbook/CommentBoxPlus-Comments
http://pmichaud.com/pipermail/pmwiki-users/2006-August/030824.html
http://pmichaud.com/pipermail/pmwiki-users/2006-July/029742.html

Pico

*It would be great if we could get the $MPItemStartFmt item to accept an array
for the font family.  Anyone know how?