Feedback on RicherSyntaxPlugin

There are problems with the "continuation" backslash.

-- FrancoBagnoli - 29 Mar 2002

Very good idea. The more the (t)wiki syntax is mailable to non-wikiers in ascii emails, the better!

A patch and a suggestion:

• IgnoringHeader.patch: Ignores contents of tag no to mess headers, otherwise skins with CSS get badly mangled
• It would be nice to be able to have a shorthand for inserting just a single
  for allowing a simple break in items. Maybe if the breaking line has just dots, make the break vertical space proportional to the number of dots?

-- ColasNahaboo - 24 Apr 2002

There is a discrepancy between the documentation and the code with regards to the H3 headers: The doc says to underline with "~~~~", but the code says to use "^^^^". One of the should be changed.

We might as well add an H4 utilizing one or the other, as in, e.g.,

      # header      
      # ^^^^^^               => <H3>

      $_[0] =~ s/(^([ \t]*)(\w.+)([ \t\r]*\n)\2(\^+))/abs(length($3)-length($5))<=1?"---\+\+\+ $3\r\n":$1/gem;

      # header      
      # ~~~~~~               => <H4>

      $_[0] =~ s/(^([ \t]*)(\w.+)([ \t\r]*\n)\2(~+))/abs(length($3)-length($5))<=1?"---\+\+\+\+ $3\r\n":$1/gem;

-- ThomasWeigert - 12 May 2002

Thanks, and sorry for the delay in my answer.

I inserted your patch in the current version.

-- FrancoBagnoli - 14 May 2002

I believe that there might be a problem in RicherSyntaxPlugin.pm at the line for processing old-style descriptions. Line 75 starts with

$_[0] =~ s/^(\t+)(\w\S*?):\s/"<dt> $2<\/dt><dd>" . &Twiki::emitList ( "dl", "dd", length $1 )/gme;

This line causes a problem with formatting if headings are following a description. A test case is attached. If I omit this line, everything seems to be working fine.

However, if this line does serve a purpose, maybe the "dl" in the call to emitList should be changed to "dt"?

-- ThomasWeigert - 16 May 2002

I ran into an interaction between this plugin and XpTrackerPlugin in that the variable XPSHOWPROJECTCOMPLETIONBYSTORIES displays a table incorrectly (see XpTrackerPluginDev) when RicherSyntaxPlugin is enabled.

-- ThomasWeigert - 03 Nov 2002

This problem (03 Nov 2002) can be traced to a bug in documentation for RicherSyntaxPlugin. The following rule is stated:

• Every two lines in which the second one has greater indentation (more white space at beginning) and does begins with a letter (in order to avoid clashes with nested lists) are glued together

However, this is also true for, e.g., "|" which by most accounts does not qualify as a letter. See Example 2 in RicherSyntaxPlugin for this situation. In fact, the only situations which do not seem to become glued together are

• lists
• ...
• only white space
• indentation after a break

The wording in the documentation should be corrected.

-- ThomasWeigert - 03 Nov 2002

checked .zip into CVS (not below patch)

-- WillNorris - 15 Feb 2005

The "compatability" with the way heafings are done in e-mail makes this very attractive for my users, but I've found a problem that blows it up when used with DEVELOP for Dakar and is in fact a backward compatability problem.

Look at lines 29 and 32 in initPlugin():

     18 sub initPlugin
     19 {
     20     ( $topic, $web, $user, $installWeb ) = @_;
     21
     22     # check for Plugins.pm versions
     23     if( $TWiki::Plugins::VERSION < 1 ) {
     24         &TWiki::Func::writeWarning( "Version mismatch between RicherSyntaxPlugin and Plugins.pm" );     25         return 0;
     26     }
     27
     28     # Get plugin preferences, the variable defined by:          * Set EXAMPLE = ...
     29     $exampleCfgVar = &TWiki::Prefs::getPreferencesValue( "RICHERSYNTAXPLUGIN_EXAMPLE" ) || "default        ";
     30
     31     # Get plugin debug flag
     32     $debug = &TWiki::Func::getPreferencesFlag( "RICHERSYNTAXPLUGIN_DEBUG" );
     33
     34     # Plugin correctly initialized
     35     &TWiki::Func::writeDebug( "- TWiki::Plugins::RicherSyntaxPlugin::initPlugin( $web.$topic ) is O        K" ) if $debug;
     36     return 1;

As you see, there is the call to TWiki::Prefs::getPreferencesvalue which should be a call to TWiki::Func::getPreferencesvalue .

The note at the top of EmptyPlugin.pm -- which I take to be the tempalte for developing plugins -- say that only TWiki::Func (lib/TWiki/Func.pm) should be used.

Never the less, I'm unclear as to why the getPreferencesValue and getPreferecnesFlag functions are duplicated in TWiki::Prefs (lib/TWiki/Prefs.pm).

-- AntonAylward - 08 Mar 2005

And another ...

On line 77 of RicherSyntaxPlugin.pm there is a call to the undocumented) innards of TWiki rather than the "Func" interface. This time it is to TWiki::emitList() Which is interesting as it really should be TWiki::Render::emitlist()

ThomasWeigert mentioned a problem with this expression above, but I've tried to look a bit deeper.

Looks like that needs some more testing.

-- AntonAylward - 08 Mar 2005

This plugin break in the Dakar/DEVELOP. See DakarReleaseNotes#Space_Tab_conversion for the reason.

-- AntonAylward - 17 Mar 2005