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[flfederation]

I've used SMF for years, but this one in particular seems to be extremely selective about newlines.

This one will probably be a new paragraph.
This one should be as well, but probably won't be. At first I assumed it was some kind of "law of the land", though other people seem to have found a way around it. The first one seems to be ok, after that... let's see if this is three distinct paragraphs, or if it joins the 2nd and 3rd. EDIT: Aha! Why does it do this? And who is exempt?

[pwhodges]

Newline should be produced by the return key.  If you want paragraph spacing you need to hit it twice.  This is different from Word (and a couple of forum packages) in which return gives a paragraph (spacing according to the style), and shift-return gives a newline without a paragraph break.

[flfederation]

Newline should be produced by the return key.  If you want paragraph spacing you need to hit it twice.

This is an SMF forum-- I haven't used Word in years. I am hitting the return key twice. What's so odd is that it only works "the first time"-- note the first paragraph spacing in the first post.

I did the same thing consistently, but the results were not consistent. What's more is that this has happened on basically every post since I got here-- though not on other forums, including other SMF forums.

I seem to have found a workaround: on the initial post it will ignore most new paragraphs; when I click Modify I seem to be able to add them.

[Tova]

I cannot for the life of me work out what you are doing.

Here is a second paragraph.

And here is a third...

It's working every time for me.

[flfederation]

Here is a second paragraph.

And here is a third...

It's working every time for me.

Yes, that's what I would expect. It's very odd to me as well, I can assure you.
How about this one?
How about this one? Is it separate?
WEIRD! But I can fix it, using Modify. It also shows the post as coming from Cloudflare, not my IP, so maybe they're doing this. I reported my own post because the odd IP was strange, but someone already told me not to worry, they said they've seen that before.

It's not a problem if it's easy to fix. If anybody else has this happen they'll know how to fix it.

[pwhodges]

What OS are you using?

[flfederation]

What OS are you using?

It varies. But on this forum, generally BSD. However, this does not happen on other forums.

[N.N. Marf]

I've used SMF for years, but this one in particular seems to be extremely selective about newlines.

This one will probably be a new paragraph.
This one should be as well, but probably won't be. At first I assumed it was some kind of "law of the land", though other people seem to have found a way around it. The first one seems to be ok, after that... let's see if this is three distinct paragraphs, or if it joins the 2nd and 3rd. EDIT: Aha! Why does it do this? And who is exempt?

I see 3 paragraphs there, but between the 1^st and the 2^nd is a double-newline. The double-newline between this and the next paragraph really shouldn't be there, but I'm using it as a typographical example. I'm padding this line out it out to give it a fuller paragraph form i.e. to have it wrap around probably at least once. It's just a matter of form, really. You can probably skip this completely. Don't worry, I'm not saying anything especially interesting.

This is the 2^nd paragraph. It's really about something similar enough the the last prior paragraph that it shouldn't be part of a new `super'-paragraph. Just pretend I'm talking about something else right now. Maybe I'm discussing a separate point mentioned somewhere else in the same response-context.
This would be a 3<sup>rd</sup> paragraph, or the 2<sup>nd</sup> paragraph in this `super'-paragraph. Anyway, I'm just padding it out again. It doesn't really mean anything per se. The next graphic characters after the next newlines, I wouldn't even consider a paragraph, because it's just a line alone separated out from everything else. Maybe it's more like a punchline. I'm using a triple-newline between that or this paragraph, but a double-newline should suffice.


I like that rendering here preserves whitespace---even if it's annoying sometimes.

[flfederation]

I like that rendering here preserves whitespace---even if it's annoying sometimes.

It does on edit, even for me. It clearly does on initial post for most, or they wouldn't find this confusing. But let me demonstrate by adding a single newline with the enter key here:Newline created. Now let's try two newlines:
New paragraph not created. Now let's try three-- perhaps this will create a new paragraph: (now using enter three times)

Is this a new paragraph? If not, whitespace was not preserved. But it's not a real problem, if I click "Modify" the additional newlines will "take" on editing.

Edit: using three newlines (even on the first post) creates a new paragraph for me, while two newlines requires an edit first. So now there is an additional way to do this.

[Tova]

I hope that someone works this out because I need answers. 

[flfederation]

Using three newlines solves the problem-- if I can train myself to do that here. If not, edit works!

On any other forum, two newlines accomplish the same. I have noticed that some formatting depends on Javascript (for example, we discovered in another thread that posts by ignored users will show anyway if Javascript is not enabled) so it's possible that this is the "magic" responsible for my experience.

I have Javascript enabled, though it is selective. At any rate if I had figured out he workarounds before posting this thread, I likely wouldn't have posted it.

[pwhodges]

This is clearly some inconsistency in handling LF (or possibly in some situations CR) on its own as opposed to the CRLF combination, specifically when multiples (maybe not always the same!) are adjacent.  Such problems have been around for over thirty years, and have mostly been shaken out - but the code base of SMF is rather old (the current version 2.0 is twelve years old, though patched at least once a year).  However, I'm not inclined to scan the whole code of the forum looking for a possible reason.

Sorry about that - but if someone cares enough, the code is open, so you can try for yourself!

It may also be relevant that the forum is running on a very old and unsupported version of PHP whose string handling may be a bit cranky; there's actually nothing I can do about that (I tried pressing for an update a couple of years ago).

[flfederation]

I assure you it isn't that big of a problem, I only started the thread to try to work out what was going on. I'm happy with the workarounds.

With that said, it's certainly interesting as a puzzle. I've never had this sort of trouble with SMF; I switched exclusively to LF-based (vs CRLF-based) operating systems more than a decade ago. I'm sure that Mac users are not uncommon here-- I've owned a couple old ones, but never purchased or relied on one. On a timeframe-related note I started reading QC more than a decade ago as well, and used to own a TEH shirt-- but now I can't imagine QC without Bubs and Claire.