[ANN] vfmd

[Roopesh Chander]

> From the user perspective, that's not how tab works, nor how

> Markdown has done things for the last decade.


I don't understand what you mean. Maybe things will be clearer if we
discuss over an example. Let's take the use of TABs in bulleted lists.

In vfmd, the leading string for a bulleted list is significant - if that
changes, it becomes a new list. So the following shall be interpreted as
two lists:

 * list 1 item 1
 * list 1 item 2
 - list 2 item 1
 - list 2 item 2

Yes, I realize that this is not how Markdown has done things for a decade,
but I think this behaviour makes the output more consistent with how the
input looks.

The same idea extends to the spaces between the bullet chars, as long as it
doesn't go under the first paragraph of the list (at which point it becomes
a sublist).

   *   list 1 item 1
   *   list 1 item 2
* list 2 item 1
* list 2 item 2

The above shall again be interpreted as two lists.

(Thanks for staying with me so far on an apparently tangential topic.)

Because this is how the syntax is defined (which is not hard or unintuitive
to follow for a user), there's no need to worry about a TAB character being
interpreted as 1-4 spaces based on it's position. If the user inserted a
TAB immediately after the bullet character, he is expected to do that for
all the list items anyway.

   *\tlist 1 item 1
   * list 1 item 2

The above too shall be interpreted as two lists.

Hope that makes things clearer as to why I think TABs can always be
interpreted as 4 spaces.

roop.


On Fri, Sep 27, 2013 at 5:37 PM, Michel Fortin <michel.fortin at michelf.ca>wrote:


> Le 27-sept.-2013 à 2:54, Roopesh Chander <roop at forwardbias.in> a écrit :

>

> >>> A U+0009 (TAB) character in the input shall be treated as four

> >>> consecutive U+0020 (SPACE) characters.

> >>

> >> No. That's often not the case. If I write "*" followed by tab to begin

> a line,

> >> that tab represents three spaces, not four. The number of spaces

> represented

> >> by a tab is 4-(column_number modulo 4). But you probably knew that. ;-)

> >

> > In vfmd, a TAB character is always 4 spaces. It's not like pressing TAB

> in

> > MS Word. For the same reason, from a user perspective, it's better to use

> > spaces instead of TABs to separate the list bullet char (`*`) from the

> list

> > item.

>

> Ok, so that's deliberate. I don't understand the motivation though. From

> the user perspective, that's not how tab works, nor how Markdown has done

> things for the last decade.

>

>

> --

> Michel Fortin

> michel.fortin at michelf.ca

> http://michelf.ca

>

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