Huh?! Plus signs underline things now?

jacobkosh
jacobkosh
edited October 2010 in Campaign Portal Building
So guys, I really like the new features and the preview button, but man, this thing of plus symbols indicating underlined text is hells of unwieldy when half a character sheet is composed of pluses and bonuses and so forth. How do I disable that and just get a regular old "+"?
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Comments

  • Academician
    Academician
    Posts: 1
    I don't have any answers, but I second the need to get this cleared up. It's killing me. I'm trying to figure out some kind of standard formatting for my campaign characters' sheets, and this is making it real tough. I'm not very good at HTML to begin with.
  • DarkMagus
    DarkMagus
    Posts: 425
    You can use the pre tag, I believe.


    +3 Strength


    I think it makes a gray box though.

    I'm not an expert on HTML, I'm sure someone more knowledgeable will chime in soon.

    Good luck!
  • Cardinalis
    Cardinalis
    Posts: 2
    Like Academician, just adding my voice to that of the troubled.
  • DarthKrzysztof
    DarthKrzysztof
    Posts: 132
    As a real horse said, "No sir, I don't like it."
  • twiggyleaf
    twiggyleaf
    Posts: 2,006
    I must agree wholeheartedly with Jakobkosh. We need the plus signs to use as plus signs.

    "I met a traveller from an antique land....."

    CotM May 2016: Mysteria: set in Wolfgang Baur’s MIDGARD.

    Previous CotM Aug 2012: Shimring: High Level Multiplanar Campaign

    Inner Council Member

  • Nadrakas
    Posts: 4 edited October 2010
    You can put a space between the word and the second + sign, or after a particular "character bonus. For example: +Underline+ would give you an underligned word, while +underline + would not.
    Post edited by Nadrakas on
  • jacobkosh
    jacobkosh
    Posts: 27
    Well, the problem is that on a character sheet, I want to use individual pluses, like

    STR 18 (+4)
    DEX 12 (+1)

    and what happens is that the pluses disappear and everything between the number 4 and the open parenthesis on the second line become highlighted.
  • Alatheon
    Alatheon
    Posts: 35
    Right, and if you write it like so:
    Str 18 ( +4)
    Dex 12 ( +1)

    you should not get an underline.
    I agree that it would be better if plus signs were dedicated as a character and not a formatting indicator, but this is a pretty easy workaround.
    Textile seems to look for formatting symbols in pairs, one at the start of a word (space before the symbol) and one at the end (space after the symbol). I ran into the same problem with dashes (which cause a strikethrough). If you consistently use the symbols after a space, you should not get the unwanted formatting.
  • DarkMagus
    DarkMagus
    Posts: 425
    I have just tried and can confirm that Alatheon's solution works. Just try putting in a space before the plus sign and you should be all set.
  • Curufea
    Curufea
    Posts: 161
    The nature of php parsing - it's a mystery :)
  • AdamDray
    AdamDray
    Posts: 10
    You can use "HTML entities":http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_ascii.asp like + for +.
  • Greipr
    Posts: 2
    I hate the +. Don't make me come to the forums to try and find a solution for the stupid underlining issue.
  • TheSouljourner
    TheSouljourner
    Posts: 22
    surround the text you want to not use textile for with ==

    so like
    ==Dex 12 (+1)==

    That'll prevent the plus from being parsed as an underliner.
  • splaetos
    splaetos
    Posts: 2
    This is stupid. When using pre-generated text (pcgen modified output to paste into here) it is insanely time consuming to deal with this by template. I don't even know why its still underlining things when I manually insert spaces before the +. Even dropping a   before the + doesn't tell the system that this is not an underlined passage. So the only way to stop this is to manually surround every + with == == or @ @, which voids completely the use of programs that are producing game data for me, as it is outputting variables that contain passages with + in them... as is natural in a role playing game.

    So to summarize:

    a space before a + doesn't necessarily work.
    + is one of the most common characters in most RPG alphabets
    You can't turn off textile(can you?)
    This is dumb.
  • TheSouljourner
    TheSouljourner
    Posts: 22
    You can probably wrap the entire pasted output in == ==
  • splaetos
    splaetos
    Posts: 2 edited December 2010
    that didn't seem to work. I managed to work around it for the most part(it just took a lot of extraneous code modification), but the main point is that there are apparently certain instances in which the tag cant be easily worked around because either I don't know fully how it works or because something in the text is causing it to go haywire. Either way, i believe I read eventually they will add bbcode, textile, or nothing as options or something to that effect, but since you are allowed to use simple html, I would just think it would be highly desirable to be able to disable textile. If only because things that are supposed to "simplify" and end up creating complexity are inherently annoying.

    So add that and a non-(player)editable map marker option to my wishlist.

    Don't get me wrong tho, I am a big fan overall of this site, never heard of it till randomly last week, and I think its a great idea.
    Post edited by splaetos on
  • TheSouljourner
    TheSouljourner
    Posts: 22
    Yeah, believe me, I hear ya. I had to go searching for the == == myself.... I'd much rather just do it all in HTML.
  • SSveter
    SSveter
    Posts: 37
    Is there a way we can get this fixed.

    I like to cut and paste stat blocks from my DM Genie. Its easy and simple but the underline thing is well stupid.
  • Ruhar
    Ruhar
    Posts: 27
    After searching everything to find out why I kept getting underlined text when I was adding +'s to my various stats I find out that it seems to be, in my opinion, a bug in the program that has been complained about since Oct. 2010. Reading this thread there have been enough arguments as to why the + sign should be a + sign and not an underline code. So, why is it still an issue? Make the + sign work as a + sign and not an underline code. Enough said.
  • Khaaaan
    Khaaaan
    Posts: 4
    Well, it looks like this has been an issue for nearly a year now and nothing has happened. But, I will voice my concern as well. The sight is to be used for RPGs. many systems use the "+" extensively. It seems absurd that "+" should be used as part of the formatting code. I can only assume that changing this is a huge undertaking, or else it probably wound have been fixed by now.

    Please take a look (again?) at fixing this.
  • Baalshamon
    Baalshamon
    Posts: 585 edited September 2011
    the plus thing can be overcome. Look at my page and you will see I use many plus signs with no underlining. You have to format the page using bullets

    * Strength (+1)
    * Agility +1
    * Damage 8d6+2
    * Duration 3+4d6 rounds

    you can look at this "page":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/star-trek-late-night/wikis/medusan for another example.


    hope that helps
    Post edited by Baalshamon on
  • Khaaaan
    Khaaaan
    Posts: 4
    Thanks Stephen, but my comment is really about the fact that for a site specifically designed as a wiki for RPGs, using the "+" as a formatting tool seems kinda short-sighted. I don't really want to use bullets as a work-around for something that really shouldn't even be there. Yes there are work-arounds. I just don't understand why the
    "+" has to be used this way at all.
  • Baalshamon
    Baalshamon
    Posts: 585
    i am with ya on this one.
  • DarkMagus
    DarkMagus
    Posts: 425
    To be fair I don't think the guys behind OP actually sat down and designed the code behind what we use for our sites, they just relied on existing code, namely HTML and Textile, and integrated some of it to their site, with some restrictions (especially in HTML) to keep the site secure. I do agree however that the usage of plus signs is quite an inconvenience for a site such as this.
  • Baalshamon
    Baalshamon
    Posts: 585
    I know DarkMagus and agree that it is a flaw of *TEXTILE* not the OP designers. They have worked with what is availavble and done a great job. I love this site overall.

    Still it is frustrating to have to type so much extra stuff when editing my pages. I wish there was a program that would convert the formatting of my word documents and make them appear perfect on the site. If that ever comes along, I will be able to put up 20 times as much stuff on a daily basis and with less errors caused by mistyped code.
  • Tindalos
    Tindalos
    Posts: 2
    This is absurd. Even moreso that was first reported a year ago, and apparently ignored? THIS SUCKS BIG TIME.
  • Vikshade
    Vikshade
    Posts: 2
    +well at least I have found some work-arounds that work, but i strongly agree that it seems weird that Obsidian Portal hasn't even adressed this issue , let alone take steps to resolve it.+
  • Micah
    Micah
    Posts: 894
    Hey all,

    Jerry alerted me to this thread, so I thought I'd give a quick response. You probably won't like it, but here goes...

    Yes, the "+" thing is a pain, and yes, it's a Textile issue. We rely on Textile so we don't have to write our own parser. We chose Textile not out of any great planning, but mainly because the parser was available and seemed to work pretty well. It's doubtful that we will make changes to the underlying Textile parser, as this kind of thing is tricky to do without messing up people's existing pages. Plus, I'm not a language parser expert, and these kinds of systems are very easy to get wrong. In the future we may allow for other parsers (BBCode, Markdown, raw HTML, perhaps others), and this would allow you more choice in how you mark up your pages. However, this may be a ways off. Here's why:

    Whenever you get angry that feature X doesn't exist, remember that we have an infinite list of things to do and only finite time to do them. Should there be a better way to input text? Absolutely. But is that the only thing that we're missing? Absolutely not.

    Off the top of my head, here are some other things that we need:

    * A way to view old versions of wiki pages (working on this now)
    * Faster page loads (also working on this)
    * Ability to customize the theme of your campaign
    * Ability to upload PDFs for characters
    * A generic "file" location for you to upload whatever you want for use by your players

    The list goes on and on and every day we add more to it. The point of this? While you may see feature X as "absolutely necessary", every day we hear from people who think Y, Z, A, B, C, D, and so on are absolutely necessary. We do our best to sort through all the feedback and peel off features that will have a big impact.

    I'm not trying to say that anyone is wrong here, nor do I want anyone to throw me a pity party. I simply want people to understand that we're not sitting on our thumbs. We're working very hard, but some things just get prioritized over others.

    In any case, we welcome the feedback, and I'm glad to hear that people are mostly satisfied. As long we make your campaigns even a little bit better or easier to run, them I'm happy.
  • Sorwen
    Posts: 64
    I haven't had the plus problem, but I didn't find it funny when a minus 6 lines down was causing a strike through. Easy to find, but a total pain to fix. Even less funny when I wanted a strike through a lot of text and it wouldn't. "Wait, what? You'll strike through here, but not here?" It would be nice if the editor would default to HTML instead. Not blaming anyone, just saying.
  • Baalshamon
    Baalshamon
    Posts: 585
    Micah, thanks for the response. I am one of the guy who gets annoyed but I do realize how much you guys do for us. I am very appreciative of the good work OP has put out and hope to see it continue to grow.
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