[Pmwiki-users] Re: right and center alignment

John Feezell JohnFeezell
Sun Feb 8 14:03:44 CST 2004


On Sun, 8 Feb 2004 21:30:44 +0100, Christian Ridderstr?m <chr at home.se> 
wrote:

> On Sat, 7 Feb 2004, John Feezell wrote:
>
>> On Sat, 7 Feb 2004 17:28:36 -0700, Patrick R. Michaud 
>> <pmichaud at pobox.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> > Anyone have proposed markups for right-justified and center-justified
>> > paragraphs?  John Rankin has been using a leading '>' to indicate
>> > right-alignment but has expressed that he's not very happy with it.
>> > I'd like to see if we can come up with a good markup for this.
>> >
>> > In PmWiki 0.6-beta I've been using '->' to indicate indented text
>> > (and other sites have been doing similar things), so it's probably
>> > not a good choice for this.
>> >
>> > In some sense we could do best by introducing it as a WikiStyle
>> > (%align=right%, %align=center%)--anyone in favor of that?
>
> I'm positive to this approach.
>
> How about introducing
>
> 	%style=par-right%
> and
> 	%style=par-center%
> where 'par-right' and 'par-center' the names of two CSS styles? (The user
> can just think of them as paragraph styles). Then we could also in 
> general
> allow
> 	%style=<style-name>%
>
> although I'm not sure on what the resulting HTML should (SPAN-element?).
> Here's a mockup:
> 	http://www.md.kth.se/~chr/pmwiki/right.shtml
>
>> > If done this way, I'm thinking that %align=right% or %align=center%
>> > anywhere in a markup line would cause the entire line of markup to be
>> > right or center justified (and having both %align=right% and
>> > %align=center% in a line would be somewhat unpredictable).
>
> If we want to keep the behaviour that %<something>%..%% only work on the
> elements within, we could use this alternative markup:
>
> 	[[style:par-right]] and [[style:par-center]]
>
> or possibly
>
> 	[[style-par:right]] and [[style-par:center]]
>
> to really emphasize that it's a style that will affect the entire
> paragraph.
>
>> >
>> > Ideas, comments, suggestions?
>> >
>> > Pm
>> >
>>
>> For me, the simplier the markup the better.  So how about:
>> > |     or     >>|     right-justify
>> <|>    or     <<|>>   center-justify
>> |<     or       |<<   left-justfy
>>
>
> You seem to mean 'short' with 'simple' here. However, I'm not convinced
> that this will be used *that* much, and would prefer a more obvious (but
> slightly longer) markup. (And instead allow a local alias that the admin
> can activate for sites that do use this very often).
>
> We could ask JR how often he writes pages that are right/center 
> justified.
>
>> The markup would be placed at the start of a line.
>
> That would be neccessary with the markup you suggested above.
>
>> [The markup] would continue in effect until alternate markup is
>> encountered.
>
> Do we really write centered paragraphs so often? I think it'd be
> better to force a new 'center'-command for each paragraph.
>
> In addition, I'm not very keen on markup suggestion above. There should
> definitiely not be a space in '> |', which leaves us the two 
> alternatives:
>
> 	>|	or	>>|
> 	<|> or <<|>> (looks like a wiki trail IMO)
>
> (where I skipped '|<' or '|<<' since IMO left should be the standard
> alignment).
>
> The markup in the right column seems a little bit to close to the one 
> used
> for wiki trails IMO (which we might want to extend the syntax of in the
> future). Actually, isn't this also markup for a wiki trail:
> 	 <|TrailPage|>
>
> In addition, I've been musing on using  (hey, it rhymes ;-)
>
> 	> asfadsfa
> 	> > bla bla
> 	> > bla bla
> 	> asdfasd
> 	> > bla bla
> as markup that pmwiki recognizes as coming from an e-mail (i.e.  the user
> did a copy&paste on it).
>
> Oh, and from the point of view of e-mail, we'll find it annoying to
> discuss this markup on the mailing list ;-9
>
>> ...probably wouldn't occur naturally in typical text.
>
> I'm not sure... unless you mean 'typically wouldn't occur in a natural
> text' ;-)
>
>> The keystrokes are all in shift mode and easy to type.
>
> I don't think that's very important here ;-)  (i.e. back to my
> argument about how this occurs).
>
>> They also relate to -> and --> that indicate indented text.
>
> If we want to relate to -...->, how about this (from the top of my
> head).
>
> 	--<>	centered paragraph
> 	-->>	right alighned paragraph
>
> they don't feel that obvious to me, but the "logic" would be that they
> are based on '-->', and for the centered paragraph there's an '<'
> inserted, and for the right aligned there's an extra '>'. Of course,
> '-<>' and '-->>' could be used just as well.
>
> /Christian

There you go making me think again. :)>

My difficulty with the style form of the markup like

	%style=par-right%

is that I tend to forget it's format if I don't use it regularly.
So here's another proposal that is a little more descriptive with a
form that is not to difficult to remember.

.center.  centered aligned line or paragraph
.right.   right aligned line or paragraph
.left.    left aligned line or paragraph

E.g.:

.center. This line would be centered on the page.
.center. This paragraph would be \\
centered on the page and all lines ending with \\
would be considered part of the paragraph \\
until the last line.

This would be a new paragraph and would have the default alignment.

Again, these would appear at the first of a line ...

After thinking about this, it seems to me that it would be helpful
to have the option of setting a default line / paragraph alignment
in GroupAttributes.  Perhaps, if someone was writing poetry, to
have a default of right alignment would be helpful so that all entries
on the pages in a group, independent of the author's action,  would
have the default alignment.

JF







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