[pmwiki-users] preformatted text

Russell Bailey russell-pmwiki at saberpunk.net
Fri Aug 12 10:38:14 CDT 2005


Personally,  I'd prefer the first solution.  Seems most intuitive to me-  
 I've been using PmWiki around a year and I got surprised by that the
other day.  I'm also not a fan of significant whitespace.

> It's often come up that we would like to have a good markup for
> representing verbatim text (monospace text, escaped from all wiki
> formatting).  The current markup for this is space+[=...=], as in
>
>      [=
>     Here is some monospace text.  Note
>     the space before the initial bracket+equals.
>     =]
>
> Essentially this is just the "lines beginning with space are
> preformatted text" rule applied to escaped text.  Unfortunately,
> it has a couple of often-described drawbacks:
>   - it's not obvious to new authors
>   - there's not a way to start preformatted text immediately at
>     the left margin, the first line must either contain a space, or
>     is a blank line.
>
> I don't propose to eliminate or change the current space+[=...=]
> markup, but in working on the documentation we definitely need
> an alternative.  Here are some proposals:
>
> 1.  Change [@...@] to mean "preformatted text" if the ... portion
> contains a newline.  Currently [@...@] is essentially the same as
> @@[=...=]@@, which generates <code>...</code> in the HTML output.
> The [@...@] markup is very useful for writing markup examples;
> i.e., to display "[[WikiWord]]" in monospaced text, an author can
> write [@[[WikiWord]]@] instead of the ugly and cumbersome
> @@[=[[WikiWord]]=]@@.
>
> However, new authors are often surprised by [@...@] when it contains
> multiple lines -- the newlines are folded into a single output line
> (as @@[=...=]@@ would do), whereas many authors expect the result
> to have the newlines preserved in preformatted text.
>
> So, perhaps we can reduce author surprise and add our needed markup
> by saying that [@...@] around text with newlines results in a
> <pre>...</pre> block instead of <code>...</code>.  We can also
> be smart about parsing initial and closing newlines, thus the
> two items below would both generate three lines of monospace output,
> with no blank lines on either side:
>
>     [@Here is some
>     monospaced text
>     spread across multiple lines.@]
>
>     [@
>     Here is some
>     monospaced text
>     spread across multiple lines
>     @]
>
>
> 2.  Introduce explicit (:pre:) ... (:preend:) directives.  Another
> possibility is to just introduce explicit directives for
> preformatted text.  The only qualm I have with this is that it
> can look a little more verbose than I'd like -- especially the
> "(:preend:)" part.
>
>     (:pre:)
>     Here is some
>     monospaced text
>     spread across multiple lines.
>     (:preend:)
>
>
> 3.  Try to create preformatted div wikistyles.  I've played with this
> a bit, but it again becomes an issue of dealing with initial and
> trailing newlines.  The best I can come up with so far is
>
>     >>pre<< Here is some
>     monospaced text
>     spread across multiple lines
>     >><<
>
> One disadvantage of the div wikistyle is that it probably cannot
> be easily used in tables.
>
> Thoughts, suggestions...?
>
> Pm
>
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