RE: [Docutils-users] BUG: Title underline too short.

[Mark M. <mar...@mc...>]

[David Goodger]
> You omitted this sentence:
>
>     An underline/overline is a single repeated punctuation character
>     that begins in column 1 and forms a line extending at least as far
>     as the right edge of the title text.
>
> The "at least as far" is significant.

My apologies.  I missed that sentence.  So the behavior is by design, I see.

> Because anything *less* than a full underline looks wrong.

I agree, it does look unfinished.  However, I keep thinking about all the
useless work involved in this scenario:

1.  Type "The Political Landscape"
2.  Type "-----------------------"
3.  Change the title to "The Political Landscape of the US"
4.  Add underscores to the underline to match the new section title.
5.  Change the title to "Politics in the US"
6.  etc.

Why should I have to keep adjusting the length of the line?

I know you pointed out that I can just type 80 of the underline characters
(or 79 or whatever) and leave that alone--as long as it's longer than the
title.

I'm reminded of Scott McConnell's comments on Commenting Efficiently in Code
Complete (pp 464-367):

He writes of this:

  ###########
  # globals #
  ###########

"Use styles that don't break down or discourage modification."

Perhaps I'm making mountains out of molehills, though?

> In reStructuredText, section titles are underlined.  Only full
> underlines get full marks.  Are you seriously proposing some other
> behavior?  If so, please be explicit.

As it is, the current dev snapshot seems to intuit that I want an underline
in this case:

The Political Landscape of the US
----

The only thing I guess I'm asking is, "Can we at least make the error
suppressible?"  And, it turns out, we can:  -r3 does the trick just fine.

I really like reStructuredText.  Thank you for developing it!

Cheers,

// mark

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