PRM 4-464 draw object 9

I have noticed that Draw and PhotoDesk render a text area object slightly differently but I find the PRM is slightly ambiguous about exactly how text area objects are rendered. A text area object is extremely useful if you want to append a chunk of text to a draw file and you want Draw to look after the text formatting (otherwise you have to look at each line, line by line, padding text to exactly fill the line width and splitting text at the right point for line breaks).

In particular it says a line feed will be replaced by a space ‘unless either preceded or followed by a space’ but in fact it should say ‘unless followed by a space’. Also ‘[LF]\L4[LF]’ is the item that is rendered differently by PhotoDesk and by Draw – to get consistency I have to use ‘[LF][LF]\L4[LF]’. Puzzling.

Neither ArtWorks nor Impression-X renders it correctly though so perhaps I am expecting too much!

In particular it says a line feed will be replaced by a space ‘unless either preceded or followed by a space’ but in fact it should say ‘unless followed by a space’.

I think the PRM4 was right at the time of writing, but it looks like in July 1995 some extra logic was added to accept <NL><space> as a paragraph break. The true omission was not mentioning it in PRM5A which post dates that.

Because the check is only made once a <NL> is encountered, the 4 possibilities are now

more<NL>text                  more text
more<NL><space>text           more 
 
                               text
more<space><NL>text           more text
more<space><NL><space>text    more 
 
                               text

I’m not convinced the “Do not skip over a space, if it was one.” is useful, because you just end up with paragraphs which start indented by 1 space all the time. Sadly, as it predates CVS so we’ll never know what triggered the change. The ‘else’ clause could be simplified now because <anything><NL><space> gives a paragraph break now.

I am very impressed that such an arcane and obscure question should receive such a prompt, specific and accurate response! Many thanks.