[pmwiki-users] leading spaces switch for 2.2.0 (somewhat important)

[Kathryn Andersen]

On Mon, Mar 26, 2007 at 07:37:52AM +0100, marc wrote:
> Kathryn Andersen said...
> > On Sun, Mar 25, 2007 at 02:34:52PM -0500, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> > > On Sun, Mar 25, 2007 at 10:48:26AM +0100, marc wrote:
> > > > Tegan Dowling said...
> > > > > On 3/24/07, marc <gmane at auxbuss.com> wrote:
> > > It's even less obvious that something as small as a single leading
> > > space is the problem.  When we explain the reason for the long lines
> > > to authors, it somewhat makes sense, but at the same time this feels
> > > to them like this is a "programmer's feature" and so perhaps the wiki
> > > really isn't for them.
> > 
> > I'm wondering if there could be a compromise: rather than having a
> > *single* leading space trigger preformatting, there could be a certain
> > number of leading spaces required, like four or eight. One or two spaces
> > are likely to be accidental, eight spaces, less so.
> 
> Two would be okay, imo, three at most, but eight would be far too 
> cumbersome.

Agreed that eight would be probably too cumbersome, but IMHO three is
too few.  So at least four is a compromise.
 
> Since spaces seem to be the issue - I think, although I still fail to 
> see the cause of the problem <Is this another issue caused by Word-
> itis?>

No, I think it tends to be caused by cut-and-paste, where something has
one single space (or two) and gives preformatting where the person did
not intend to do so.

> not the issue as described by Pm - a trivial markup would be 
> okay, say, ";; " (semicolon, semicolon, space), something that can be 
> achieved quickly (e.g. a non-shifted, repeated key) and doesn't require 
> closure. This is still a pain, though, to be honest, for other reasons. 

No, I'd rather have spaces; if I had to use markup, I'd rather go with
the existing [@ @] markup.  Putting ;; in front of all preformatted text
just seems far too ugly to me.  Spaces are good because they're already
used in other contexts (mediawiki, txt2html) to indicate preformatted
text.

Though note that txt2html, at least, defaults to 5 spaces to trigger
preformatting (and this number can be changed with an option).

Kathryn Andersen
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