Text reflow woes (or: I want bullets back!)y

[Sean Conner]

It was thus said that the Great solderpunk once stated:
> 
> I remain as commited as ever to the idea that any text/gemini markup
> should have the property that simple clients can just dump it right to
> stdout verbatim and that should be very usable.  As I argued
> previously, this rules out any kind of syntax where <pre> lines are
> indicated by some per-line prefix, as that prefix would break
> copy-and-pastability for simple clients dumping things to stdout.
> This is one more reason not to use the "leading whitespace" system
> proposed by Sean[2] (whose detailed spec remains a very nice and
> useful precise definition of lots of fuzzy concepts being slung around
> here).

  Thanks.  I understand the concern about copy-n-pasting (I see issues all
the time on Reddit when people don't understand to prepend each line with
four spaces when posting source code).

> So, given this, I am pretty much settled on using an easily
> recognisable line to toggle this mode on or off, say:
> 
> ```

  I have questions.  Oh, do I have questions.


```
This text is on the left.
		This text is mostly centered.
				This text is on the right.
```

But now ...

````
Note that there are four ticks.
  What's the expected result?
    Literal text?
      Or reflowed text?
```

```
This is similar to the above,
  but the block ends with four ticks,
    not the expecte three.
````

``` What about trailing text?
  Is that allowd?
    What is the expected result?
```

```
```

(You should be able to handle the above as well).

> I have experimented with supporting this syntax, and allowing
> reflowing of text not enclosed by ``` lines to an arbitrary
> user-specified width in AV-98 (not pushed to tildegit yet, but expect
> it soon).  It really is not too difficult to do, so I don't think
> complexity of implementation is a good argument against this.

  One thing to watch out for are lines that exceed the wrapping length with
no space (or dash if you are ambitious) characters to break on.

> Does anybody know of a programming language where lines consisting only
> of three consecutive single quotes happen to occur frequently?

  I want to say Python.  I don't program in Python, but I know I have seen
that syntax in some lanuage.

  -spc

> [2] gemini://gemini.conman.org/gRFC/0004