For some time now, I can’t see to be able to format paragraphs in posts here, they used to work fine not that long ago. Does anyone know if there was a change in Discourse and it’s done differently now? I’m using Microsoft Edge so a change in the browser is another possibility.
Thanks!
P.S. Apologies for tagging this to Dorico!
It just seems to require leaving a blank line in the editor.
When I do so (as here), I get a nice space that’s not as big as a whole blank line.
Thanks Mark. I must say to me your two lines look as two regular lines of text.
Do you see your own message differently than this screenshot?
I just checked this thread on an iPhone and Mark’s messages does indeed display a blank line. But I am not seeing it on the desktop browser (Ms Edge). It seems I can create it because it’s displayed on an iPhone. Just on not here. How weird…
Yeah, it must be your browser’s handling of paragraphs with the <p> tag.
Here’s how it looks for me in Safari 14 on Mac:
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Thank you for this, Mark.
I tried typing random lines of text using these “p” tags from the official Discourse tutorial on Markdown and they create line breaks but not paragraph space between them.
However, it seems that a backslash does create a paragraph in preview. Here’s a screenshot of how it looks in my editor with a backslash:
EDIT: the line between paragraphs seems quite big when done this way. And any text that I type underneath an image always changes the font to something that looks like a system font.
It’s obviously a Chromium thing. On Windows 10, Firefox looks like Mark’s pic. Chrome and Edge (which is now Chromium based) looks like ebrook’s.
Can you link to that? I run several Discourse servers and I have not seen a tutorial on Markdown as supported by Discourse specifically. I’d be interested to know.
Do you mean this, which is an external page that the Forum Guide links to?
That’s a better guide than the ones I’ve seen.
P.S. @ebrooks I don’t mean using html tags in messages. But I inspected the code of my message and Discourse appears to convert 2 returns to a <p> tag for browsers.
Also …
… Discourse is smart enough to copy formatted text and paste it into the message composer with valid markup, which sometimes teaches me new tricks. For example, I typed the <code> tag with entity codes like < in post #5. It re-pasted here delimited with back-ticks ` and I see that allows me to type special characters like angle brackets directly.
I’d recommend Firefox over Chromium-browsers, firstly for security and privacy; but at least to have as a ‘backup’ browser for testing or when things don’t work.
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That link above is the ‘official’ Discourse Markdown tut. There are quite a few dialects of Markdown, and syntax varies, as does output rendering (e.g. GitHub will do it their own way).
This is a Discourse Admin option setting regarding using two spaces. This not accessible to end users. I show it here for reference:
Use of two spaces is off by default. (although that tut mentions it).
The point about browsers and HTML is that they are free to render HTML as they will, and there are inevitable differences between them. Not large nowadays, but nevertheless there.
As for browser recommendations, there is no best one - it’s a highly personal choice, and a wide one now too.
The key point is that yes, people will different browsers will see paragraph spacing differently, but I suspect it is rather minor after all.
You would have to ask whoever supports the Discourse platform if changes have been made to the markdown engine plugin. I have no idea who that may be, and in any case I think an important commercial forum such as this would be on the enterprise hosted plan.
Also, if I use Edge, @Mark_Johnson 's post appears widely spaced as not compacted. That’s Edge Version 104.0.1293.70 (Official build) (64-bit) on Windows 11.
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Thanks Andro. I have:
Perhaps the Beta might have something to do with it, but I have the same exact issue with this:
Interestingly, I found out about the backslash for paragraph breaks in Edge while retyping some of the Discourse tutorial exercises in this very window; this was the unintended result. It’s indeed a minor issue, but highly annoying in terms of clarity especially in longer posts. I’ll consider Firefox, since Safari is no longer developed for Windows.