On Wed, 7 Mar 2001 11:04:38 -0500 (EST) Joel Burton <jburton@scw.org> wrote:
I've been teaching users to use Structured Text for their messages, but I've come across a few small annoyances:
. Some items (like links) don't render if there isn't some text after them. If the very last part of an STX document is a link, it gets rendered as plain text. Added \n after will fix this.
Hadn't spotted that.
. Items that have 2 linefeeds after them are rendered as a heading, even if they are not intended to be. eg """
this is text
"""
comes out as a heading
That's because it looks like a single line paragraph, I think. I always had difficulty getting the lines I intended to appear as headings working unless I added a space at the end of the line. I guess the extra new line counts as that space. So as a rule of thumb - if you want a single line to appear as a heading, put _two_ white space characters (one of them a new line) between it and the subsequent paragraphs, but if you want a single line paragraph to just be a paragraph, split the line over two lines.
. you can't nest things in sensible ways: "**Visit my "site":http://www.site.org.**
is in bold, but loses the link, whereas
"**Visit my "site":http://www.site.org. ** isn't in bold (asterisks appear)
I know STX is supposed to be a simple format, and I'm not advocated for complicating/changing the rules--but I find the behavior inconsistent w/expectations about how things should happen.
The standard documentation for it was lifted out of the structured text module itself, and hasn't undergone much alteration. Personally I found it rather confusing.
Are there patches that fix these issues (I haven't seen any)? Are there workarounds? Is there a document ("advanced Structured Text") that I could point users to that would suggest workarounds for these problems.
Sounds like it's time for a better document to be written. John