[pmwiki-devel] [pmwiki-users] linebreaks behavior setting in config.php?

[J. Meijer]

On 2/10/07, marc <gmane at auxbuss.com> wrote: 
Tegan Dowling said...> the default isn't, in my experience,> something that makes sense to people who come to wiki markup from the> word-processing world.That's pretty much the crux of it. And because folk have beenconditioned to behave in a certain way, they struggle to adjust to abehaviour that seems unnatural to them - happens in many areas of life,of course. But it ignores the fact that the word processing world is alatecomer to a very, very mature field. Word processing folk generalbattle with typography too - and make a really, really bad job at it[not that the tools help] - yet it has rules of thumb that have beenderived from centuries of experience. That's one reason why LaTeX outputwill always look "professional" compared to 99.99% of Word docs, evenwhen the author has done nothing but thrown their text at it.--Cheers,Marc
 
The difference between linebreaks on and off is easily overstated. It is easily associated with linebreaks that should insert any amount of vertical whitespace at will. Yet it is about ignoring linebreaks when there is one -and only one-. In all other cases behaviour can be identical! So this isn't about purism. In Word it is the difference between a Shift+Enter and an Enter. 
 
The single linebreak isn't a paragraph, it's a break, a CR if you will. No whitespace is inserted, the paragraph continues as if nothing happened. 
 
Marc, perhaps you can enlighten me why that isn't desirable behaviour? Tons of experience by others won't help me. I'm sceptical though. 
 
I do have experience with large documents in Word and OpenOffice, and both are simply unreliable, with Word being the king. Of unreliability. That's how I found my way to Lyx, but alas, too late. Wikis seem to be a better fit :-) 
 
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I too don't wish to change the default PmWiki linebreaks behaviour. I too get mistaken in this regard. 
 
Wikis are converging and the linebreaks default represents the mass. Creole as a standardization platform had to surrender to that. Creole struggles to find arguments, but this really isn't about arguments at all. Creole just obeys an order to conform to the status quo (first). PmWiki always has, but nevertheless strives to provide functionality as defaults. 
 
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In an ideal world, PmWiki would come with a wizard that records the administrators preferences and constructs an example config.php from it as its output. Output that can be pasted directly into the actual config.php file. Each step would have helpfull links to documentation. 
 
Would that be hard to zap (or adl/fox) together? Not so I think, to the contrary, the necessary stepping stones seem to be in place. It would transform a lot of discussion into hot air. That's the business we are in. Someone should do it. Thank you someone! 
 
/jm
 
 
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