Not planned Preserve user-inserted spaces in the editor

[jauburn]

Poets need a forum editor that preserves user-inserted spaces because the formatting of poetry is often essential to its meaning. So far in the forum software world I have found very few packages that include an editor that preserves user-inserted spaces. Simple Machines is one. However, I much prefer the more robust forum packages in most other respects, and for my longstanding poetry forum for serious writers, I would love to adopt Xenforo. But I can't because, like the editor in vbulletin and many other forum software packages, the editor in xenforo strips all user-inserted spaces when a post is saved.

Is there any hope that xenforo may be in the future for my forum?

Thank you.

 

[jauburn]

I need an option to preserve user-inserted spaces in the Xenforo editor. SimpleMachines Forum software does it, and that's free. As it is now, I have to rely on the TinyMCE Plugin in Xenforo 1.x to make this happen and to allow me to use Xenforo at all.

What I'm asking for is pretty basic from a writer's perspective. Give admins the option the allow the presentation layer to preserve user-inserted spaces.

If one of my users types this, I want Xenforo to present it as it was typed into the editor!

And by the way, it's not just poets that need the kind of flexibility I'm talking about. The 3- or 5-space indented paragraph has been around since long before I was born, and that's a long time. How is one to accomplish that with the current editor? If I hit the space bar 3 or 5 times, the editor ignores all of those spaces I entered.

The only way I see to do that in the current editor is by using the "Insert...Code" tag. A standard, first-line indented paragraph is not code!

 

[jauburn]

I wrote to the creator of the Froala editor about this issue. Here's his response:

By default, our product should preserve the spaces as they are typed if there is no processing being made over to the HTML on server side before rendering it.​

​

If this is the case, I'm wondering why the xenforo implementation of this editor strips user-inserted spaces.

@cclaerhout @Jake Bunce @AndyB

 

[Mike]

We do preserve the white space. And you can confirm it by looking at the source of this line in my post:
"x y"

HTML will collapse white space by default and we simply use/allow that behavior. You would need to override that behavior with a relatively small add-on or use something similar to code tags to opt into it (with a different white-space value).

Beyond your requirements, there hasn't been much demand for this, so an add-on or custom BB code would likely be what we'd recommend.

 

[jauburn]

We do preserve the white space. And you can confirm it by looking at the source of this line in my post:
"x y"

HTML will collapse white space by default and we simply use/allow that behavior. You would need to override that behavior with a relatively small add-on or use something similar to code tags to opt into it (with a different white-space value).

Beyond your requirements, there hasn't been much demand for this, so an add-on or custom BB code would likely be what we'd recommend.

Thanks. Well, I guess I'm hoping someone creates an add-on or that @cclaerhout ports his TinyMCE plug-in to 2.0.

Tags are not attractive as a solution because (1) they're unintuitive--people want to be able to copy-paste from their editor at home and have the look of the piece preserved, (2) using the "tag" will require training/reminding (not practical and ongoing headache), (3) they're kinda ugly.

@Jake Bunce once suggested to me that he was going to create a plug-in to accomplish this, but I don't think it materialized.