Subject: [Tools-discuss] datatracker: writeup: preformatted text

From: Frank Ellermann <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Oct 2011 18:55:51 +0200

Hi, please check out

<URL:https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-appsawg-rfc3462bis/writeup/>.

Somehow "very long lines" arrived in the <pre>-formatted element;
apparently one line per paragraph.  The line ends for a reasonable
width, say, 78 char.s or 70em, went AWOL.  How about putting the
draft input into a <div><p> with a mono-spaced font for the <div>,
and "translate" one or more adjacent empty lines into </p><p>?

This would destroy SP SP after dots and colons, and introduce
bogus line break opportunities for all hyphens; and if that is a
problem SP SP could be replaced by SP &nbsp; and hyphens could
be translated into "&nbhy;" code points.  But it would eliminate
the odd "very long line" horizontal scroll effect.

For a real WySiWyG experience maybe "reject" input with lines
longer than 78 char.s, or put the <pre> in a <div> with width
95% and some overflow-style.  Or fix the input form if it "eats"
submitted line ends:  It is possible to get this right, compare
Wikipedia.  But this might be hard, e.g., for GMail I need some
"user script" kludge to get a barely working WySiWyG effect for
mono-spaced text/plain no-nonsense input with line breaks where
I want them (and nowhere else.)

-Frank