[pmwiki-users] RFC: Core candidate offerings

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Fri Mar 31 12:19:58 CST 2006


On Fri, Mar 31, 2006 at 12:02:10PM -0600, Jon Haupt wrote:
>    On 3/31/06, Jonathan Scott Duff <duff at pobox.com> wrote:
>      > 2.  Lines beginning with a backslash force a new paragraph.
> 
>      Er ... why? Is the extra blank line really a hardship somewhere?
>      Seems gratuitous.
> 
>      > 3.  Another possibility is to have a leading '%' begin a new
>      >     paragraph;
> 
>      Again, why?
> 
>    I actually have to agree with Jonathan here on points 2 and 3.  It would
>    be neat to be able to do this, but I think more authors will be confused
>    by too many newline-related rules when I never have heard anyone complain
>    about this.

Actually, it's come up in a number of different contexts and
email messages.  At present, there's not a way to have a 
center-justified paragraph followed immediately by a left-justified 
paragraph (i.e., without an intervening vertical space).

    %center% This is center-justified
    %left% This is still center-justified.

In the most recent instance, Allister Jenks has asked to be able
to produce paragraphs that have less than a full paragraph
space between them.  At present there's not a clean way to
achieve this, but by introducing either #2 or #3 above, 
there is at least the possibility of:

    #2:  using leading-\ to mean new paragraph

    Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. 
    \%p top-margin:0.5em% Nunc vitae turpis ac pede suscipit dapibus. 
    \%p top-margin:0.5em% Fusce auctor. Quisque posuere libero ac nulla. 

    #3:  using leading-% to mean new paragraph

    Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. 
    %p top-margin:0.5em% Nunc vitae turpis ac pede suscipit dapibus. 
    %p top-margin:0.5em% Fusce auctor. Quisque posuere libero ac nulla. 

There have been at least a couple of times where I wanted the
ability to start a new paragraph without having to have the
previous vertical space.

Others have also asked about the possibility of styling
paragraphs with first-line text indents; this is another case
where having an explicit "paragraph" markup would be useful
to avoid the vertical space between paragraphs:

    %define=p text-indent:40px apply=p%

    %p% This is a paragraph where the first line is being
    indented by 40 pixels (one tab stop).
    This line wraps and continues the first paragraph.
    %p% This starts a new paragraph, which is immediately
    below the preceding line (no vertical white space)
    and has the first sentence indented by
    a single tab stop.

Although, now that I think about it, Allister could possibly
solve his problem with:

    Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. 

    %p top-margin:-0.5em% Nunc vitae turpis ac pede suscipit dapibus. 

    %p top-margin:-0.5em% Fusce auctor. Quisque posuere libero ac nulla. 

But to me negative margins in CSS aren't really a good way to be
doing such things.

Pm




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