[pmwiki-users] PmWiki DocumentationGuidelines

[Patrick R. Michaud]

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.

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.

> 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'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.

> 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.

Pm