Preformatted & Monospaced ?

[IM]

Evenning.

Something major that bothers me about EE, is that there's no monospacing.

Something that bothers me about the phpBB forums, is that they not only (appear to) lack monospacing, but are also not preformatted !!

It gets soooo very very frustrating -- particularly when you're trying to use some ASCII art to illustrate something, and it displays completely different to how you entered it in the text area..

Furthermore, I feel that these text areas should also be of a monospace font perhaps.

Any thoughts?

Cheers

[nicholassolutions]

I think the code tag can be used for this. For instance, if you want to show someone what the 'tux' looks like:

Code:

              a8888b.                          
             d888888b.  
             8P"YP"Y88
             8|o||o|88  
             8'    .88    
             8`._.' Y8.  
            d/      `8b.  
          .dP   .     Y8b.          
         d8:'   "   `::88b.      
        d8"           `Y88b    
       :8P     '       :888      
        8a.    :      _a88P        
      ._/"Yaa_ :    .| 88P|  
      \    YP"      `| 8P  `.    
      /     \._____.d|    .'      
      `--..__)888888P`._.'

[COBOLdinosaur]

Yeah that is what the code tag is for.  It gets implemented as monspaced and pre.

As for monospaced text are... maybe as a user option if there is some demand for it, but it is the first time I have seen anyone ask for that on a PHPBB board where the code tag is available.

[IM]

Fair enough. But the only problem then, is that in order to draw and then display an ASCII image, then you'd need to produce it in notepad (or some other monospaced text editor), and then copy and paste it from there (as the text areas are not monospaced).

But I suppose that's not too much to ask for, so I shan't rant on any more :)

ThanQ.

[nicholassolutions]

(as the text areas are not monospaced).

This I actually do see as a problem. If you look at the TAs, almost all of them will involve some kind of coding, and frequently it will be typed right in the textarea without testing. It sure would be nice to be able to easily see how the indenting will look without previewing the post (possibly many times), and it should not make much of a difference what font the textarea is in when you are not typing code. I think this is worth eventually sending  for a vote, because it would make the site more usable and would only require a small change in the CSS.

[COBOLdinosaur]

The monospaced fonts are fine for posting code, but not every topic involves posting code. Especially in a forum geared to discussion.

Large blocks of text in monospace look terrible.  Perhaps we could add a user option to use monospace for their posts.  Setting it as a fixed board style removes flexibility.  There is no point having the code option if we are going to make everything monospaced.  All it would do is take a formatting option (code) and impose it on everyone; thereby reducing the enjoyment and usability for those who don't need or want monospace.

If you want to vote on it fine.  But it is almost certain that after we ahve a lot of users on the site the Governing Council wil have to revisit it because on every board I have see where they try using monospaced for comments they get a lot of complaints about how crappy it looks.

[nicholassolutions]

Just to clarify, I'm not suggesting actually displaying the comments in monospace (except for the code of course) when they go up on the board -- just changing the font of the textarea in the posting form to monospace. So, you'd enter your comments in courier, and when you viewed the posts, you'd see exactly the same format we have now: arial for comments, courier for code.

I agree that for regular comments, monspace gets to be really tiresome and ugly.

[nicholassolutions]

alternatively, perhaps we could add some kind of JS widget that allows you to switch fonts while you write code so that you can see what the indenting looks like...

[COBOLdinosaur]

You mean like this
iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

I can put it this way and see it everyone lies it better, but the change had to be made in the top level stylesheet, and affects ALL text areas, so if I have to start fixing a lot of other CSS it will have to come back out.

[nicholassolutions]

Thanks Roy  :thumbup:
If it has to get changed back or if people really hate it, it's not the end of the world.

[coral1]

If you need this reopened, PM me.    :glasses7: