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problem with formatting of bold+italic

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Luca Ferrero

27 Aug, 2013 11:51 PM

in the most recent version of MMD beta 2.5 (but also in the previous one), the combination of bold and italic (***word***) is not correctly formatted in the normal view window (but correctly formatted in the preview and tex output)

I have also encountered problems with the use of the comment style. When I introduce a comment line in the middle of a text, when I first open the comments with <!-- all of the following text is treated as a comment for style purposes (greyed out in my stylesheet). However, once I close the comments with --> the text following the comments remains styled as a comment. To put it back to the original style I often need to insert a carriage return before each paragraph and then delete it. I did not observe this behavior in previous versions of MMD but only in the most recent ones (including 4.5 beta)

1. Support Staff 1 Posted by Fletcher on 28 Aug, 2013 12:24 AM

   

   Yup. 2.4.6 fixes the "***word***" issue, but I have a couple of other things to add before this version is released. This problem arose due to a fix in strong/emph parsing in MMD.

   As for the comment, a comment will only be triggered if there is an opening "<!--" and a closing "-->". So, if you open a comment, and there is a subsequent comment later in the document, everything in between is treated as a comment. When you add the intervening "-->" to close the first comment, the paragraph being edited is styled appropriately, but if your comment spans a paragraph (e.g. a blank line in between), the subsequent paragraph is not restyled.

   This is done intentionally --- restyling the entire document with every keystroke would be a huge drag on performance with longer documents. Simply check out some of the other Markdown editors with so-called "live" updating to see what I'm referring to.

   I have a couple of ideas:

   1. Checking HTML specs shows that a comment cannot have "--" inside it. I have modified the comment "recipe" used by MMD so it won't match a comment with a "--" inside of it. This means that one comment cannot use the closing "-->" from a subsequent comment because the intervening "<!--" blocks it. This won't entirely solve the issue you describe under some "creative" situations where you are editing comments that span multiple paragraphs, but it would prevent accidentally creating a comment that spans paragraphs like the situation you describe.

   2. I am considering a background timer that will periodically restyle the entire document when there's nothing else going on (e.g. every 5 seconds or so). However, I worry that this would cause unnecessary performance hits 99% of the time that it runs. I used this technique in Composer v1, and it worked but occasionally could slow things down a touch on slower processors with long documents. I've gone through great lengths to avoid this technique to minimize CPU use, battery drain, etc. This is one of the first loopholes discovered in quite a while. Since #1 will probably fix the problem, I might hold off on #2 until it's absolutely necessary.

   3. As a temporary fix until 2.4.6 (which will contain #1 above), select all/cut/paste will probably be faster than deleting and reinserting carriage returns depending on where your cursor is. But either will force a restyle of the affected paragraph

   Thanks for writing in to point these issues out, and I expect 2.4.6 to be released in the next few days with the App Store version to approved several days later.

   F-

   --
   Fletcher T. Penney
   Manager, Founder
   MultiMarkdown Software, LLC
   [email blocked]

   • smime.p7s 4.78 KB
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2. 2 Posted by Luca Ferrero on 28 Aug, 2013 12:40 AM

   

   Thanks for the explanation and the upcoming fixes. Just a quick note about
   the comment issue. I did not have any problem until the most recent
   versions (i had the problem only in the last couple of months and i always
   keep mmd up to date) but my documents always included a lot of comments,
   some spanning multiple paragraphs . Hence I was wondering whether something
   broke in the most recent versions.

   • Edit

3. Support Staff 3 Posted by Fletcher on 28 Aug, 2013 05:16 PM

   

   To my knowledge, nothing changed that should have affected this as you described. I suppose it's possible?

   In either event, let me know if you still have problems with 2.4.6.

   FTP

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4. Fletcher closed this discussion on 28 Aug, 2013 05:16 PM.