Syntax Questions

[Michel Fortin]

Le 2008-07-17 à 16:41, Jan Erik Moström a écrit :


> Well, there is a good reason why Markdown doesn't do this. Many  

> prefer to use a plain text editor which doesn't wrap text (I for  

> example prefer my text files this way) and we insert hard new lines  

> to keep the lines from becoming too long. If those hard newlines  

> were translated into <br /> Markdown would be useless for a lot of  

> people.


That's one reason. Personally, I often generally don't write hard- 
wrapped paragraphs... except inside lists and blockquotes where I  
wants things aligned properly in the source text.

For instance, I don't want my text editor to wrap automatically my  
like item like this:

     1.  First item of a list with two lines worth wasted text
     for your reading pleasure.

So I indent correctly the second line to make it better looking and  
easier to write:

     1.  First item of a list with two lines worth wasted text
         for your reading pleasure.

By doing this, I'm inserting a newline character at the end of each  
line. If Markdown was adding a line break there, then I'd be forced to  
write the bad-looking version, reducing readability of the source text.

The same applies to blockquotes:

     > This and that and this and that and this
     > and that and this.

You couldn't indent each line with a ">" if Markdown was to convert  
every newline to a `<br />`.



> (and I don't think there is an option to get it to behave the way  

> you want)



No there isn't one.


Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://michelf.com/