[pmwiki-users] RFC: Core candidate offerings

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Sat, Apr 01, 2006 at 02:21:15AM -0700, H. Fox wrote:
> On 4/1/06, Patrick R. Michaud <pmichaud at pobox.com> wrote:
> > ...Suppose that
> > we're using novel-style paragraphs...
> 
> Book-style paragraphs are a useful purpose for the explicit-paragraph
> markup.  so are poetry-style pages.

In the proposal just sent, one could do:

    %book% Here's a book indented paragraph. Lorem ipsum 
    dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Etiam 
    diam tellus, dapibus vitae, sagittis eu, aliquam sit.

    %book% amet, sapien. Donec rutrum ante sed metus. 
    Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci 
    luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae. 

    %book% Pellentesque commodo ultricies nisi. Fusce 
    vitae quam. Duis dolor. Mauris tincidunt, nisi sit.

and the %book% style could suppress the vertical whitespace
between paragraphs.  However, I agree that an author might 
prefer to write/see:

    \    %book% Here's a book indented paragraph. Lorem ipsum 
    dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Etiam 
    diam tellus, dapibus vitae, sagittis eu, aliquam sit.
    \    %book% amet, sapien. Donec rutrum ante sed metus. 
    Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci 
    luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae. 
    \    %book% Pellentesque commodo ultricies nisi. Fusce 
    vitae quam. Duis dolor. Mauris tincidunt, nisi sit.

or

    P:    %book% Here's a book indented paragraph. Lorem ipsum 
    dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Etiam 
    diam tellus, dapibus vitae, sagittis eu, aliquam sit.
    P:    %book% amet, sapien. Donec rutrum ante sed metus. 
    Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci 
    luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae. 
    P:    %book% Pellentesque commodo ultricies nisi. Fusce 
    vitae quam. Duis dolor. Mauris tincidunt, nisi sit.

as being more representative of the output.  

> Aside from that have a lot of\\
> pages and I see even more\\
> on pmwiki.org that contain way\\
> too many lines with the (IMHO\\
> unsightly) double-backslash\\
> markup.
> 
> A past message to the list mentioned that pages with a lot of such
> markup can be significantly slower to render.

For small numbers it's not significant.  The ones where it's
significantly slower is when there are dozens of consecutive lines
with \\ at the end, essentially turning the text into a single
markup line for processing.  The regular expression patterns then
take significantly longer to perform matches on the (very long)
markup line.


> Would the new markup for
> \explicit paragraphs have any
> \effect on page rendering
> \speed?

No, because unlike \\ at the end of lines (which joins lines
together), here the markup lines remain separate.

This is an important distinction to make:  "\\" at the end
of a line produces a line break (<br />) but causes text to 
remain in the same paragraph, while "\" (or "P:") at the beginning
of a line would produce new paragraphs.  The example markup
above would produce four separate paragraphs, whereas if it 
was done with "\\" at the end of each line then it would 
be a single paragraph.

> Even if not, I think it looks a lot better.

I totally agree that something like

    \Would the new markup for
    \explicit paragraphs have any
    \effect on page rendering
    \speed?

looks a lot more faithful to the output and author-friendly than

    Would the new markup for

    %p margin-top:0% explicit paragraphs have any

    %p margin-top:0% effect on page rendering

    %p margin-top:0% speed?

Pm