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

[Neil Herber (nospam)]

On 2007-03-26 Kathryn Andersen is rumoured to have said:
> For example, there's a world of difference between
> 
>         mv -f Makefile Makefile.bak
>         imake -DUseInstalled -I/usr/openwin/lib/X11/config -DHasGcc2=YES
> 
> and
> 
> mv -f Makefile Makefile.bak imake -DUseInstalled
> -I/usr/openwin/lib/X11/config -DHasGcc2=YES
> 
> The second one is garbled, but that's what would happen if the
> whitespace preformatted rule were to suddenly vanish.
> 
> Especially in the case of the sequence of commands, they need to be
> exact, so that it can be helpful to cut-and-paste the commands to make
> things easier.
> 

I am sure this dead horse does not need any more flogging, but ...

It looks to me that the example above is a case of conflating two 
features: preformmated text and honoring linebreaks.

I have found that my users are often surprised by the effect of a 
leading space, but once they undestand it, they use it to honor 
linebreaks rather than to produce monospaced text. Some are annoyed that 
the font changes.

-- 
Neil Herber
Corporate info at http://www.eton.ca/