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

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Mon Mar 26 08:57:19 CDT 2007


On Mon, Mar 26, 2007 at 08:24:02AM -0400, Neil Herber (nospam) wrote:
> On 2007-03-26 Kathryn Andersen is rumoured to have said:
> > For example, there's a world of difference between
> >         mv -f Makefile Makefile.bak
> >         imake -DUseInstalled -I/usr/openwin/lib/X11/config -DHasGcc2=YES
> > and
> > mv -f Makefile Makefile.bak imake -DUseInstalled
> > -I/usr/openwin/lib/X11/config -DHasGcc2=YES
> 
> It looks to me that the example above is a case of conflating two 
> features: preformmated text and honoring linebreaks.
> 
> I have found that my users are often surprised by the effect of a 
> leading space, but once they undestand it, they use it to honor 
> linebreaks rather than to produce monospaced text. Some are annoyed that 
> the font changes.

It did occur to me that some sites might want to use leading spaces
to force linebreaks (actually, "new paragraphs").  Then the following
would work to generate separate paragraphs:

        Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing 
    elit. Ut enim tortor, auctor non, pellentesque non, rutrum 
    at, est. Sed auctor metus non nibh elementum fringilla. Aenean 
    consectetuer fermentum nulla. Duis dolor. Cras a arcu. 
        Sed tempor, tortor et suscipit consequat, erat arcu 
    porttitor justo, lobortis lacinia leo nunc id elit. Nunc dui 
    sapien, vestibulum eu, faucibus a, luctus molestie, lorem. 
        Donec ante. Suspendisse tempus, metus a consequat malesuada, 
    tortor neque lacinia lacus, sed adipiscing nisi eros vel mauris. 
    Quisque non libero ac orci porttitor molestie. 

Somehow this seems like more evidence that PmWiki shouldn't select
any particular whitespace behavior by default, but allow one to be
selected by a site administrator.

Pm



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