[Rdoc-list] preformatted text

[Ian A. M. <ima...@we...>]

Hello

I'm using RDoc to turn simple markup text into valid XML (XHTML) for
my website's pages and weblog. It works great. I have noticed one
thing that is a bit irritating though; when one has a series of
pre-formatted paragraphs such as

  Festival of Friends
  -------------------
  an elegant song won't hold up long
  when the palace falls and the parlour's gone
  we all must leave but it's not the end
  we'll meet again at the festival of friends.

  smiles and laughter and pleasant times
  there's love in the world but it's hard to find
  i'm so glad i found you -- i'd just like to extend
  an invitation to the festival of friends.

the blank (space only or just nl) lines get interpreted as an end of
the preformatted region. It seems to me that what could be useful to
do is have those empty lines skipped in terms of their interpretation
as an end of a preformatted region. This way one could have a true
preformatted region that included whitespace without worrying about
having spurious paragraphs interspersed throughout. It would make for
a more predictable outcome.

I've been looking at the code for rdoc. It seems that an important
file for this is: markup/simple_markup.rb It might be useful to have
some sort of tracking variable to help decide what to do in this
case. I value code cleanliness and would value a small hint at a good
strategy for doing this. If it seems useful and works well I'd like to
get this in the main distribution of RDoc and want to avoid
implementing a solution that is messy or in contravention of
conventions for the project. Please forgive my timidity. I've never
contributed to a public project like this but am looking forward to
doing so. I've also added support for a quick way to put indicators
for URLs, images, and acronyms that might be useful for the HTML
outputter. I need to add support for addition of arbitrary attributes
to these things (to, for example specify the alignment of an image).
RDoc is the nicest simple markup implementation I've seen. It's non
intrusive and deals with whitespace in a logical way that is not
burdensome for the writer.

Sorry for my verbosity.

-- 
Ian A. Marsman
Software Developer - Victoria, BC
ima...@we...
http://prosodic.ods.org