[Doc-SIG] Documentation markup & processing / PEPs

David Goodger dgoodger@bigfoot.com
Thu, 21 Jun 2001 00:14:55 -0400


on 2001-06-18 5:12 AM, Tony J Ibbs (Tibs) (tony@lsl.co.uk) wrote:
> Anyway, what I (that is, me - I can't guarantee anyone else)
> *specifically* want is two things:
> 
> 1. Ability to have inline literals with the 'correct' number of spaces
... 
> 2. Ability to have a non-breaking space

In what contexts do you need a non-breaking space? One area reStructuredText
doesn't touch is character sets or (SG|HT|X)ML-character-entity-equivalents.
  can be considered part of markup or of character sets/entities.
Suggestions?

One point: I believe some time ago you thought that you could get away with
using inline literals for non-breaking spaces::

    no`` ``break

(At the time the markup was single-backquotes, not double as above.) That's
not supported by the spec, since the start-strings and end-strings aren't in
the proper context; reversed contexts, in fact.

> So if inline literals preserve spaces and can't span lines,
> I would be happy

Inline anything is part of the flow of the paragraph, and thus should be
able to flow right along with the rest of the paragraph text. I can see
satisfying 'preserve spaces', but inline literals *may* span lines.

> (NB: it *should* be up to the presentation format what
> it does with these, so the parser certainly shouldn't be dropping the
> spaces, for inline literals at least).

Agreed.

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