CSS tip for offline perlmonks writing

[adrianh]

Quick CSS tip for those who tend to write their longer perlmonks posts in a text editor rather than in a textarea field.

Add the following to the top of your HTML while editing:

<style type="text/css">
code {
    display: block;
    white-space: pre;
    color: red;
}

p > code {
    display: inline;
}
</style>

In a vaguely CSS compliant browser it will cause code blocks to be displayed as pre-formatted blocks, unless they're inside a paragraph tag, where they're displayed inline. I also colour them red, but that's just for taste.

This allows me to happily sit in my editor and see a better approximation of what will appear online in the preview window.

(and don't forget to remove the style tags before you post online)

[EdwardG]

++nice tip

Anyone using vim under windows might also find it helpful to map a key to preview their post in a browser, like this:

"open current file in browser 
map <F11> :update<CR>:silent !start D:\MOZILL~1\MOZILL~1.EXE "file://%
+:p"<CR>

Update: Added quotes around filename

[Anonymous Monk]

Nice tip adrianh, thanks. I do have to ask though: Does anyone really type in the textarea fields anything but the most trivial bits of text? I can't imagine doing so myself.

[davido]

Does anyone really type in the textarea fields anything but the most trivial bits of text?

I do.

Most of my less-trivial code snippets posted here are written using my code editor, tested, and then pasted into the text box.

But 100% of the actual text and markup tags of all of my 300 or so posts to this site were typed directly into the textarea field. Why not?

[Anonymous Monk]

A textarea is far too limiting of an editing environment for my tastes and I am quite surprised that others don't find it so. When I'm writing and editing text I want to do it in the best editing environment I have, not some crude, barely functional text widget in a browser. Everything I post here is written in a real editor and pasted into the textarea. I can't think of a single reason not to use a real editor.

[theorbtwo]

Most of my posts are written directly in the textarea. This is mostly because I'm highly lazy, and often falsely lazy. It's also because cut-and-paste in X tends to mess me up for some reason. It's also because I become more perfectionistic about my formatting when I'm using an HTML editor, to the point where I never end up posting. (See, for example, this half-done tutorial on context, which I normaly would have just posted where I started writing it, and not decided that it should be recast as a tutorial... so now it's sitting, waiting for me to have another burst of wanting to talk about such things. (BTW, the contents of my pad tends to change quite a bit, so if you're reading this significantly after it's posted, that link is unlikely to go anywhere useful.)