<div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 4:37 PM, <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:orc@pell.portland.or.us">orc@pell.portland.or.us</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
Where is whitespace alignment important except at the start of<br>
a line? (And just what font would have sizeof(N.) be large<br>
enough so that you'd need to indent more than 7 leading spaces<br>
to line up with the text items? Wouldn't that count as a<br>
pathological case ("If you use the super-wide-periods font,<br>
your list items will look raggedy. Sorry.") and be ignored?)<br></blockquote></div><div><br></div>The scary truth is that aside from the start of a line, "basic Markdown" doesn't give two burps in a whirlwind about monospace versus proportional. Secretly, <i>I</i> usually use Verdana as my typical editing font. It's <i>only</i> when having characters line up vertically becomes an issue that I use a mono font, and that's relatively rare. Primarily it really hits the fan whenever anyone starts talking table formats because then communicating vertical alignment becomes <i>meaningful</i>. Until then, it largely doesn't matter.<div>
<br></div><div>If I had my druthers, Markdown would be more like some other "indentation aware" systems I use in which the actual amount / number of indentational whitespace characters at the beginning of a line don't matter, just the relative indentation to other text. That'd make it hard to do more than one level of indentation stepping at a time, but how often does that come up in actual practice? But, sadly, that's not how it's defined. And we get on.</div>
<div><br></div><div><i>(My personal theory is that the holy wars re monospaced vs proportional may be part of why there's no native table design in Markdown ...)</i><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Alexander Williams (<a href="mailto:thantos@gmail.com">thantos@gmail.com</a>)<br>
Operation BSU (<a href="http://operationbsu.livejournal.com">http://operationbsu.livejournal.com</a>)<br>"Like a morning show. Only interesting. And at night."<br>
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