[Doc-SIG] Re: David's Idea for Lazy Indentation

[David Goodger]

Moore, Paul <Paul.Moore@atosorigin.com> wrote on 2001-08-14 06:44:
> Excuse my butting in - I'm not a member of the doc-sig, but I
> noticed this while browsing the web archives.

Not at all; glad to have you, the more the merrier. Please join up!
(It's free you know. :-)

> Surely this is a simple case of "don't do this"? My understanding is
> that "structured text" (whatever form) should be something that can
> be automatically translated into other forms (TeX, HTML, PDF,
> whatever) but which is (as well as possible) readable in plain form.
> In which case, your two examples are *only* "readable" as lists.

One very important thing was missing from the original post: mention
of the context. In this case, the context is for applications like
Wikis and email, where decent editors are not available, and a
"shortcut" lazy indentation mode may be desirable. Rest assured, it
will not infect the rest of reStructuredtext.

> PS As a check, did my enumerated list above work as
> (re-)structured text?

Yes, it looks fine, except that something (probably your email client)
hard-wrapped a few words that stuck out a bit too far to the right, which
would throw the parser for a loop. This is *exactly* the reason lazy
indentation may be necessary in applications like email; thanks for
providing an (unwitting) example! To see the problem, take a look at your
message in the archive:

   http://mail.python.org/pipermail/doc-sig/2001-August/002138.html

-- 
David Goodger    dgoodger@bigfoot.com    Open-source projects:
 - Python Docstring Processing System: http://docstring.sourceforge.net
 - reStructuredText: http://structuredtext.sourceforge.net
 - The Go Tools Project: http://gotools.sourceforge.net