zim-wiki team mailing list archive

[Jaap Karssenberg <jaap.karssenberg@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 7:01 AM, Anthony Thyssen
<A.Thyssen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:

> This brings me to what I consider Zim's major fault.
>
> If a file is marked as being PLAIN TEXT (complete with a ".txt" suffix)
> Zim does not treat it as plain text!
>
> That is I still require to wrapper the text contained within the file
> with a ''' at the start of the file to make everything in the file
> (beyond the header) plain text.
>
> In fact it was this simple handling for plain text that made me pick ZIM
> in the first place.
>
> But even then Zim still munges the text stored in the file occasionally
> with other unwanted wiki formating.   Such as linkes or extra quotes
> such as  ''....''
>
>
> So I ask...
> Can you please treat plain text files (.txt) as just that!
>
> So not add formatting, headers, or other unwanted garbage when the file
> format is ".txt".   If I want wiki formatting the file will have some
> other suffix, like ".zim"
>


I understand your request, but my first reaction would be that zim is not a
"plain text browser" but a "wiki text browser". So what you consider a
fault, I consider a design choice.

There has been a lot of discussion on how to handle plain text attachments,
and I think your preferred way of using pages falls into that discussion.
(Please see mailing list archive and bug tracker for previous discussion.)

I'm willing to look into how to make zim handle plain text attachments as
plain text instead of wiki pages, but this will never be the default for
e.g. for new pages created in zim. If that is what you want I suggest you
look into creating a custom storage backend module implementing that
behavior. This is not very difficult, just a python module that decides
where and how to store the pages as files - see development documentation in
the source code for details.

Regards,

Jaap


P.S. one friendly comment, please don't use capitalization in emails like
this -  to me it feels LIKE YOU ARE SHOUTING AT ME, and that makes me want
to flag a mail as spam without reading it