[Zope] Is Structured Text Broken in Zope 2.4x ???

[Chris McDonough]

> Specifically, hierarchical bulleted and numbered lists (i.e. outlines) 
> render with ugly spacing and tables don't render at all. A possible 
> patch for the spacing problem appears in a comment by datagrok at the 
> bottom of this ZWiki page:
> 
> http://www.zope.org//Members/jim/StructuredTextWiki/TightParagraphStructuredText 

StructuredTextNG and classic structured text have different rules for 
tables, unfortunately.  I have no idea why.

Here are the rules for NG: 
http://dev.zope.org/Members/jim/StructuredTextWiki/StructuredTextNGRules

Here are the rules for classic: 
http://dev.zope.org/Members/jim/StructuredTextWiki/ClassicStructuredTextRules

Note that tables aren't documented in classic stx.  This is probably no 
accident.  Somebody likely added table support to stx classic without 
going through the right steps.  This is not good, but it's life.

The ugly spacing issue I dont know about.

> Additional info on the lack of table rendering appears in this post:
> 
> http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-September/100485.html
> 
> Additional Zope 2.4.x Structured Text issues are documented by Ivan 
> Kurmanov in this post:
> 
> http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-October/100763.html
> 
> and by Simon Brunning in this post:
> 
> http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-September/100498.html
> 
> However, an even much more severe problem lurks in Zope 2.4x. That is 
> that the structured-text() method in Products.PythonScripts.standard is 
> badly, badly broken. In addition to the problems listed above, this 

<snip>

> These bugs appear to be a significant barrier to practical use of Zope 
> Page Templates.
> 
> Am I missing something?

Probably not.

> 
> Is the problem simply that StructuredTextNG was used in Zope 2.4x before 
> it was fully debugged?

No.

> Should Zope just revert to ClassicStructuredText (which was at least 
> stable)?

No.  The fact that Page templates' use of StructuredText is broken 
doesn't necessarily mean that structured text is broken (although it may 
be).  We just need to fix the bugs if any.

I'd ask if you could put these issues into the Zope "collector" but its 
been down for a month.  And as soon as I send this mail, this subject is 
*way* gone from my head.  ;-)  I suggest sending bugreports to Ken 
Manheimer, who is working on the new collector:  klm@zope.com.
-- 
Chris McDonough                    Zope Corporation
http://www.zope.org             http://www.zope.com
"Killing hundreds of birds with thousands of stones"