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Help Keywords : NOTEFORMAT.
Help Category : Communication.
Related Helps : Board, Notes, 'Note Read' .
Last Updated : 2024-02-17 14:43:18.
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This helpfile documents how the note formatter works - probably in way
more detail than most people care about!
The basic problem for trying to auto-format notes is context - we never
know if a newline was intended to be a newline or it's just continuing
the previous paragraph.
- At first we tried a modified version of the regular description
formatter but without trying to combine paragraphs so everything
until the next blank line is considered the same paragraph. Immediate
problem with that was that if I ended a note:
Thanks,
Lasher
It would combine them to "Thanks, Lasher" - clearly not what we want.
- Next we tried it like the Aardwolf note formatter online does, where any
line over 80 characters is formatted as it's own paragraph but the rest
are left alone. For this to work, you would have to either enter notes
and format them manually as you do today, or enter every paragraph as
one long string. Realistically, that isn't what happens, what happens
is people enter multiple lines but over 80 characters, so this:
This is a long line in a note that will go over 80 characters and it is followed by
another long line in a note that will also go over 80 characters to see what happens.
With each one formatted as it's own paragraph, you get this:
This is a long line in a note that will go over 80 characters and it is
followed by
another long line in a note that will also go over 80 characters to see
what happens.
- That isn't good either. So here's what we ended up with:
Once we see a line with more than 80 characters in it, everything from
that line until the next blank line (or line containing only @w) is
formatted as one paragraph. All other lines are left alone.
This isn't perfect but it's as close as we're going to get with how much
time we want to spend on this.
This also conforms to one of the ground rules which was that I should be
able to 'format' every note already on the live boards that already has no
lines more than 80 visible characters and notice zero differences. There is
more logic in there than this to try to handle some color codes (it won't
handle xterm) etc, but this is the general approach.
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