Re: Mosaic 2.0 bug?

Rik Harris (rik@rdt.monash.edu.au)
Tue, 07 Dec 93 10:51:24 +1100

Andreas Gehmeyr <gehmeyr@forwiss.uni-passau.de> wrote:
> Anybody care to comment on how the following is rendered using Mosaic
> 2.0 for X?
>
> <PRE>
> Notice that this block is indented four spaces. Also notice
> that if a line has an &lt;EM&gt; which spans a line <EM>like this,
> the following line is improperly (?) indented</EM>.
> </PRE>
>
> At least on my system (SGI Indigo^2), the third line is indented only
> about half as much as the other lines. I'm guessing this is wrong.
> If anything, I'd expect the line to be indented more because of the
> spacing of the emphasized font.

I have mentioned this to the bugs address for Mosaic, but I guess
they're too busy to do anything with it at the moment. The HTML spec
says:

Within a PRE element,
.
.
.
Anchor elements and character highlighting elements may be used.
.
.
.
NOTE: HIGHLIGHTING

Within a preformatted element, the constraint that the rendering must be on
a fixed horizontal character pitch may limit or prevent the ability of the
renderer to render highlighting elements specially.

This suggests to me that if you can't provide fixed-width characters,
then it is better not to do any highlighting within the <PRE> section.

My situation is similar. I am formatting tables for the man2html
converter, and it is convenient to use <PRE> to do this formatting.
If one column is bolded, though, you end up with jagged columns, due
to the differing widths of the bold characters.

<PRE>
<B>WW</B> some information about WW
<B>ii</B> some information about ii
</PRE>

Keep up the good work, NCSA,
rik.

--
Rik Harris - rik.harris@vifp.monash.edu.au              || Systems Programmer
+61 3 560-3265 (AH) +61 3 565-3227 (BH)                 || and Administrator
Fac. of Computing & Info.Tech., Monash Uni, Australia   || Vic. Institute of
http://www.vifp.monash.edu.au/people/rik.html           || Forensic Pathology