Question

I know when a lot of people want to paste e-mails on the twiki - the TWiki formatting engine makes it look horrible. I have been having people use the <verbatim></verbatim> and %BR% tags - however I feel there must be an easier method.

Environment

-- ArthurClemens - 01 Aug 2007

Answer

You could use

<div style="white-space:pre;">
mail message
</div>

Put the html in variables in Main.TWikiPreferences:

<verbatim>
   * Set STARTMAIL = <div style="white-space:pre;">
   * Set ENDMAIL = </div>
</verbatim>

So users can write:

%STARTMAIL%
mail message
%ENDMAIL%

-- ArthurClemens - 01 Aug 2007

But what's the benefit of writing %STARTMAIL% ... %ENDMAIL% over =<verbatim> ... </verbatim>?

• verbatim may look un-TWikiish, but at least it is documented.
• The solution with a div element will still cause strange (or wrong) display if the mail contains < or > or & in the wrong places.
• Mail authors sometime take care to line up their lines which makes sense only if a monospace font is used (could be added to the style attribute, of course)

-- HaraldJoerg - 01 Aug 2007