From: David G. <go...@py...> - 2008-10-20 19:49:32
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On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 15:09, Red Wraith <red...@gm...> wrote: > | I know about the line-block feature but I think it is > rather uncomfortable for writing documents which often > use line breaks. Having to write always | in the right > line and having to indent the lines all the time is > stressful IMO. > | Imagine you're writing, for example, a novel where you > almost always use line breaks instead of normal > paragraphs. ... ISTM that your use case is just too esoteric for reStructuredText. reST is designed to support standard prose styles with a readable syntax. It is not meant to support experimental styles of writing and layout. If there are real-world examples of the kind of documents you're talking about, please provide evidence (e.g. URLs). Apart from indentation, reST doesn't have the concept of begin/end markers for block-level constructs. That's a design decision. IMO what you're proposing does not fit the reST aesthetic. -1. Possible alternatives: * Use a "container" directive and define a corresponding style that removes vertical whitespace from paragraphs (http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/ref/rst/directives.html#container). * Use the "compound" directive to indicate compound paragraphs, and apply a style to them. You'll still need to indent though. (http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/ref/rst/directives.html#compound-paragraph) * Create a directive that does what you want, release it to the world, and gather support. Perhaps with widespread support the change will make more sense. > | However, many other things can't be done if there is only > the line-block feature. For example, one can't connect > "Literal Blocks" to other paragraphs without producing > gaps in the output. > | One also can't put lists directly after a text block > without producing an empty space between, etc. Why would one *want* to do either of these? > | Moreover, you always have to care about the length of > your lines when writing the source document if you're > using line-blocks excessively. reST is a 2-D markup language. One cost of this is that indentation and line breaks can be significant. > Last but not least, a source document which often uses > line-blocks become almost unreadable if the text editor, > which is used for displaying the source file, uses a > shorter width than the original line width the file was > written for (and automatic wrapping applies). So widen your text editor window, or turn off auto-wrapping. Line blocks normally are not used that often anyhow. > PS: Until here, I used the line-block feature for this mail to > demonstrate that it's not very comfortable for writing such documents. > Of course, for this certain case, I could've written this mail only > using normal paragraphs, but that's not the point. Understood, but it wasn't convincing. "Such documents" are not common. Show me some real-world examples and maybe I'll understand better. But sorry, reST isn't going to adapt to your unique personal writing style. > PPS: I am using a news reader to send this mail. I'm not subscribed to > the mailing list. I'm not sure if this might prevent me from receiving > all answers. Until now, I've received one answer to this thread in total. Before your reply there was only one answer on the mailing list, mine. If you're using a mail/news gateway like Gmane.org, anything sent to the mailing list will show up. -- David Goodger <http://python.net/~goodger> |