On text reflow. It's not about bullets!

Brian Evans b__m__e at mailfence.com
Fri Nov 29 17:39:59 GMT 2019
solderpunk wrote of their suggestion to have a beginning and end marker for raw
text strings in gemini content. If I am understanding correctly, the suggestion
would serve a similar purpose to the web tag `pre`:
<pre>
Here is
some text. Whose newlines
and spacing are exact/raw.
</pre>

I actually think we should go the opposite way. I think we should provide a
start and end marker for reflowed text, treating raw text as the default. Since
raw text output is what simple clients will likely build, it makes sense to treat
that as a first class citizen/default. GIven that a large percentage of potential
userbase will also be using gopher, they are used to text behaving in this way.
Adding the extra ability to have text reflowed gives them what they know,
but with added features. Seems like a win.

As a result we could end up with something like the following:

This is a _____line with extra spaces
________denoted here with udnerscores since this
__will___be rendered____as html for this list.
.FLOW

And
here
is
a line
that
would get all flowed together

ignoring the newlines
I have annoyingly entered.

.ENDFLOW
The flow___state___has been toggled back
__off, and these 
spaces and newlines are
now rendered as written.

________________________________________

Something like the above could work (I am not at all proposing that marker text/name
it is just being used to represent an idea). Given that .FLOW and .ENDFLOW are on their
own line it is easy to parse them out and not have them print.

Anyway, those are my two cents at present. Subject to change.


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