zim-wiki team mailing list archive

[Jaap Karssenberg <jaap.karssenberg@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dotan, all,

Ok done some checking of various scenarios. Conclusion is that it
indeed makes sense to have an escape character in the wiki syntax so
you would be able to input arbitrary sequences of characters and have
them represented properly. However not to loose to feature to use wiki
formatting in the editor this requires tight control of the inline
formatting.

I see 3 cases:

1) Copy / paste text into the editor
* Add additional "copy as wiki" and "paste as wiki" actions
* Bonus would be to have "copy as mediawiki", "copy as dokuwiki" etc.
* Option in preferences for format to use for copy paste, default plain text
* Improve plain text parser to do a few non-intrusive formatting
steps, bullet lists come to mind
* Any syntax conflicting with wiki syntax should be escaped when
pasting as plain text

2) Typing in the editor
* Have a preference to control if wiki syntax is auto-formatted or not
* If not enabled any syntax will be escaped
* If enabled syntax will be reformatted on the fly so you have
immediate feedback how it is interpreted (+ undo to cancel cases were
formatting was not intended) - latest release already has a option for
auto-formatting syntax, improve upon this option.

3) Input in the "create note" dialog
* For now use same semantics as for pasting (so consider this dialog
like a clipboard when putting the note into zim)
* For future development make this dialog a full editor window

If you have any comments please help expanding the design in the wiki
page instead of replying to this post. The link is:
http://www.zim-wiki.org/wiki/doku.php?id=escaping_wiki_syntax

So far no plan when this will be implemented. Don't expect it to be
ready for the next release.

Regards,

Jaap