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

Kevin Hayes kevinhayes at adelphia.net
Mon Mar 26 06:14:39 CDT 2007


My wiki users are mostly college students and faculty. They're almost
all users of MS Word. The commonest reason for them having spaces at
the beginning of a line, paragraph actually, is pasting in indented
text.

I tested with my copy of Word 97. Using default settings, I found that
text indented with paragraph formatting (first line indent or hanging
indent set in Format/Paragraph) didn't produce spaces. Using a tab at
the beginning of a paragraph, which I think is common among my users,
produced five spaces.

So it would seem if you want to avoid unintentional preformatted text,
you'd want six or more to do that. Of course, that could be an option.

I'm in favor of having this as an option I can turn off and on. At least for
most of my users, preformatted text is simply something they don't
want and don't really understand the need for. The WikiWord feature is
turned off for all my wikis; I find it easier to train people to
explicitly create links, plus they can freely use spaces in links
inside [[]] and have good looking links that make sense to readers.

I've found in my two years of deploying PmWiki, mostly in education,
I've taken features out, not added them in. The skins have all been
stripped down to the bare minimum and any feature that might possibly get
in the way of writing gets removed, if possible.

I thought going into this that college students would be more
sophisticated users than they turned out to be. I frequently forget
that I'm an advanced user with years of experience and am frequently
surprised by other peoples' lack of knowledge and skill in using
software. So I have to simplify things as needed.

Wikis are for writing. Anything that makes that more difficult should
be an option.

Kevin




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