[pmwiki-users] PmWiki.BasicEditing

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Fri, Aug 12, 2005 at 03:40:19PM -0500, Chris Cox wrote:
> Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> > I've started a revision of the basic editing page, at
> > http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PmWiki/BasicEditing .  The top
> > part of the page introduces the editing process and very
> > basic markups, while the bottom part of the page is a table
> > that demonstrates other basic markups.
> 
> All I can say is .... "Eww! A Table!"
> 
> I find the (:markup:) thingy to work pretty well and just
> let it go linearly down the page... obviously this
> is very subjective.

Yup, which is why I'm asking for opinions.  I think we can
somewhat compare the formats between

    http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PmWiki/BasicEditing
    http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PmWiki/TextFormattingRules

The first uses the table-oriented version, the second uses
the linear (:markup:) version.  Personally I think the BasicEditing
side-by-side version is a little easier to scan than the one
that has the markups interspersed with the prose.  But I'm probably
the person who needs this page the least, so I'd really prefer
other choices.

And yes, it's a table, and I figure it's one of the few places
in the documentation where using a table is actually useful.  At
least we're using a table *as a table*... :-)

> I did a quick test on the page for lines ending in \
> 
> Where is that needed?  I mean in general white space
> is eaten.  Now if it pro\
> duced
> 
> Not if it produced
> 
> something like that behavior... I could see the usefulness
> .. maybe...  but as it is.. it inserts a space.

Well, the original purpose of \ was to get a subsequent line to
join to the previous one, thus

    * This is a list item\
    continued on the next line

allows the list item to be split across multiple lines (for a variety
of reasons).  It's a reasonable question as to whether it should
insert a space or not; my original thought (almost four years ago!)
was that the newline did generate a space.  In the case of

    Now if it pro\
    duced

I figured that if an author didn't want the space between "pro" and
"duced" then they would've written

    Now if it\
    produced

instead.  But clearly one can argue it both ways, we could say that
the join doesn't include the space, so that to get the space an
author must put the space before the backslash, as in

    * This is a list item \
    continued on the next line

There are other reasons for not inserting the space, having to do
with generating linebreaks and the way that HTML renderers compute
line-heights.

> Just curious.

Be careful what you ask for... :-)

Pm