[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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