Re: Mosaic 2.0 bug?

Rik Harris <rik@rdt.monash.edu.au>

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Message-id: <199312062351.KAA05140@daneel.rdt.monash.edu.au>
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Subject: Re: Mosaic 2.0 bug? 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Mon, 06 Dec 93 14:00:46 CST."
             <9312062000.AA03828@maple.iapa> 
Date: Tue, 07 Dec 93 10:51:24 +1100
From: Rik Harris <rik@rdt.monash.edu.au>
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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