VoteOnLeadingWhitespace-Talk


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My users often get caught on this so I am strongly in favour of no leading white space. My users tend to compose their material in word processing documents and paste them in to the wiki, so their tabs and leading spaces (in the case of Japanese documents) tend to wreak havoc on their posts to the wiki.

Shaney March 25, 2007


For my unsophisticated users, this is a primary "gotcha", and it takes a fair amount of explaining and handholding to help them get their text under control. It happens frequently when they paste indented text from a word processing program. Text that "displays as entered" doesn't really make sense to them. So I'm in favor of making it an option.

Kevin Hayes 3/24/07


I'm sort of neutral on this, because of the reassurance that the existing PmWiki default will be available as an option. There are a large number of code-snippets and examples on my work's wiki which it would be an extreme pain to have to re-edit them all to put [@ sections around them.

Kathryn Andersen March 23, 2007, at 07:22 PM


I'd expect leading white space to mean indent a paragraph, either first line or entire thing. Pre-formatted, non-linebreaking, monospace text isn't expected. The number of new authors bitten by this is under-reported on the list because authors will ask their admin, who may not report it.

What about a single-use program to go through a site and find leading whitespace? It would at least tell the admin which pages need work. It might even be possible for it to change and ask for approval for each page, depending on what sort of patterns exist in the pre-formatted code.

Sandy March 23, 2007


It seems sort of like there are alternate ways to make sure that the text doesn't get lost in long lines. There seem to be some special css hacks, and coming in css3 is text-overflow--would this make a difference?

It may be that the leading white space is not intuitive, but I think the long line problem is a less compelling argument.

JonHaupt March 23, 2007, at 08:48 PM


I've found leading whitespace generating preformatted text only mildly annoying at times usually because my normal instinct is to hit the tab key and that doesn't work too well in a browser. But aside from that, I've always found " [=...=]" ugly and >>pre<<...>><< looks much better and that would pretty much eliminate my usage of leading whitespace in this regard (It's very rare that I'd want to preformat a single line).

ScottDuff


Leading whitespace for pre-formatted has always annoyed me, because it's such an obscure concept of "formatting." A space everywhere else -- between these two points > < for example, is not interpreted as anything special. And if it's in there by accident, it's hard to track down for a newbie. OtherMichael


I just asked my unbiased (never using Wiki) colleague, and he expected leading whitespace resulting in indented paragraphs, not preformatted. OliverBetz

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