[pmwiki-users] PmWiki DocumentationGuidelines

[H. Fox]

On 3/11/06, Patrick R. Michaud <pmichaud at pobox.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 11, 2006 at 03:13:08PM -0700, H. Fox wrote:
> >
> > Side question: Is there a way to get monospaced text with normal
> > word wrapping?
>
> Short answer 1:  @@...@@ is inline text, monospaced, and word wraps.  But it doesn't honor line breaks in the markup.

Are you sure?  This

    http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Test/MonospaceWordWrap

doesn't wrap in Firefox or MSIE.

> Short answer 2:  Not reliably with current browser technology and CSS
> standards.
>
> CSS 2.1 defines a "white-space: pre-wrap" property, but none of the
> major browsers support it yet.
>
> If one is willing to go outside of the CSS standard, Mozilla and
> Opera reportedly support "-moz-pre-wrap" and "-o-pre-wrap" values
> for the "white-space" property, and IE 5.5 introduced a "word-wrap: pre"
> property.  I haven't tried any of these.
>
> I suppose that instead of generating a <pre>...</pre> block
> we could instead generate <code>...</code> blocks with <br />
> tags at the line breaks, but that seems to be the wrong approach.
>
> Another approach that has been tried is to have PmWiki directly
> word-wrap any <pre> text at a fixed width (the (:markup:) directive
> does this), the downside being that the width of lines has to be
> fixed so that it shows line breaks even when more room is available.
> I also hear from a number of people who are consistently confused
> by the automatically inserted linebreaks in (:markup:), which
> makes me reluctant to do it in the more general case of <pre>
> text.

If the lines could wrap in the normal manner, that would be less of an issue.

(A "hard wrap" is two lines in the clipboard and a "soft wrap" is one
line in the clipboard, correct?)

> > Despite the fact that more than half (more like three quarters[1]) of
> > the world seems to be using a 1024x768 or smaller display, PmWiki is
> > oriented toward a larger display area.
>
> I disagree; I've always tended to test and design PmWiki for 800x600
> screens.  Some of the *documentation* may have been written in such
> a way that it doesn't display well on 800x600, but AFAICT that's not
> PmWiki's (or my) doing.

I suppose I was just referring to the docs and the edit form.  That
said, I wouldn't suggest reducing the textarea's height *that* much.

> > I've been doing a lot of template testing lately and it's frustrating
> > that the default skin moves the edit form's buttons below the bottom
> > of the browser's viewport when the browser window is resized to
> > 1024x768.
>
> We can easily fix the number of rows in the text area so that this
> doesn't happen.

I like the tall textarea, but one or two fewer lines wouldn't hurt and
for 1024 and smaller displays the difference would be significant.

> > Even the default skin is affected by this.  Size your browser down to
> > 800x600 (yes, 20% still use this resolution) and view a page with a
> > very wide line in it.  Since the content area is a table cell, all of
> > the normal text will stretch out to the width of the longest long
> > line, rendering some pages very difficult to read in a small browser
> > window.
>
> I've tried for years to find a solution to this problem -- until
> browsers (notably IE) provide us with a nice way to keep long <pre>
> lines from messing up the overall page width, or CSS evolves to be
> able to better handle alignments of dynamic content, I don't have
> a good solution.
>
> > While I'm at it, is there a way (say in skin.php) to limit the width
> > of (:markup:) blocks?  The default is just a bit too wide.  I'd like
> > to avoid this effect:
> >
> >     http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Test/Markup2?skin=lean
> >
> > Note that the (new?) default width is also too wide to fit in the
> > viewport of an 800x600 browser window using the default skin.
>
> I increased the width of (:markup:) to 80 chars this past week;
> obviously that's too much, so I'll take it back down to 70.

75 seems perfect.

Hagan