On Feb 26, 2009, at 6:47 PM, Michel Fortin wrote:
Perhaps you should mention that you're now forcing a table cells to
be properly aligned using a monospace font. This in fact makes the
syntax impossible to use in a proportional font context.
While it's true that many people use a monospace font and that in a
text editor you can change the font, I'd like to mention that
Markdown is also used for writing comments and blog posts in
textareas not formatted with a monospace font, and for which it may
not be easy to change the font. Forcing proper alignment makes the
table syntax unusable in these situations.
Now, given that cell continuation using colons relies on that proper
alignment with a monospace font feature (or else you risk mistaking
colons in the text for column separators), I don't find that syntax
very satisfying.
Well, they're not mutually exclusive. If we continue to allow the use
of the colon to suggest alignment, and if a user doesn't need to
continue a line, then the existing MultiMarkdown syntax should
continue to work, even with a proportional font. But to get the line
continuation feature, I don't see any way to do it other than
requiring proper spacing.
Of course, I'm so used to looking at database output in a terminal
session using [Consolas][] that I'm sure I'm quite biased when it
comes to spacing tables with a monospaced font.
[Consolas] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolas
Allowing `+` as column separator in the header underline looks like
a good idea though.
Yeah, that alone allows one to simply paste most any output from psql
or mysql and have it just work.
Best,
David
_______________________________________________
Markdown-Discuss mailing list
[email protected]
http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/markdown-discuss
