It's come up a couple of times in these forums about how to create nicely formatted posts - especially when dealing with code examples.
Although it ain't elegant (lots of things aren't - and perahps I unfortunately get used to it) - the way I do nicely indented posts is as follows:
"
- Use the <pre> tag (use this sparingly - really wide posts make reading them, and all the responses, rather painful)
- Whenever you want to put in an HTML or XML tag - always begin it with: <<x> - i.e. a
less-than, followed by less-than-x-greater-than (you could using something other than 'x', I use it for simplicity)
- Always Preview your post to make sure you didn't goof somewhere (I've occasionally missed something this way)
- Usually compose the entire message in another editor and then copy/paste it into the textarea provided - this makes it easier to do the original composition, and also makes it easier to edit if you find problems during preview
- Be cognizant that vertical white-space does make a difference. If I were writing this message for non-formatted Markup, I'd have
auto-fill (I use Emacs) turned on and keep all lines within 80 characters. When composing formatted notes, however, I leave auto-fill off as the line breaks show up otherwise.
Also consider putting things like the <<pre> tag on the same line as the preceding text and starting the following text on the same line too (pre, ol, ul, and li tags render with additional vertical white-space)
Although I'm sure many folks will say "
Ugh - how stupid", and I wouldn't really disagree, I'm not sure if putting a full-fledged WYSIWYG editor into a free forum is going to happen anytime soon, not to mention that doing so may limit the platforms / browser that can be used to access it - which I think would make the cure worse than the ailment...
But Wait! There's More! - you also get ....While I'm spouting off some practices here for formatting posts - I might as well take the time to spout off some other good practices:
).
- If you have multiple files you wish to attach, zip or tar and/or gzip them to attach them all to one post.
- To get to the place where you can attach files - you need to check the I want to preview my post and/or attach a file checkbox, below the textarea where you enter all the main body text
- Please make it a practice to include version and platform information with your posts. This includes the primary version number, patches and service packs applied, etc. Sometimes it's just the particular Interwoven product, other times it may need to include information about the browser or some other 3rd party application.
This information goes a long way to helping receive accurate responses more quickly (less back-and-forth asking for the information in subsequent posts).
Hope that helps...
--fish
(Interwoven Senior Technical Consultant)
