This feels like a newbie question, but for my life I cannot figure it out.

I know of no markup tags that can produce a typewriter font such as in this post. And it certainly does not appear in the FAQ.

So how is that done?


Oh, and by the way, how do you do that "In reply to:" thingie? No, seriously, my first question is perfectly serious.

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Emil's series of famous moments in film history:
Turn back, Sarah, before it's too late!

It is done with the [ pre ] and [ / pre ] tags.

Bowie in Australia 2004 | Join the Community

I feel so stupid. It's actually in the FAQ. On the other hand, there is no hint at all what pre actually means.

Surrounds the given text with pre tags.

That makes little sense to me! (perhaps because I don't speak English?)

Is this function new? Was this ever announced? I cannot recall having ever seen this until a few weeks ago. (and a search for "typewriter" in all forums, all posts gave a zero result.)

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Emil's series of famous moments in film history:
Turn back, Sarah, before it's too late!

I think it has always been there but as you say, it is really unclear what PRE is used for.

According to my HTML guide, the PRE tag is meant to show everything exactly as entered including line feeds and blank spaces.

Now as far as I know, the message board is designed to work like that anyway.

It also says that when a character string is nested in the PRE tag and has more characters than can fit in the screen width, the string will be automatically broken into multiple lines. But again, the TW CP does that most of the time anyway.

Bowie in Australia 2004 | Join the Community

In reply to:

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the PRE tag is meant to show everything exactly as entered including line feeds and blank spaces.

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Well, every character takes up the same space, just like a typewriter-typed text. A table can thus be made to be perfectly aligned:

Young Americans    1975
Station to station 1976
Low                1977
"Heroes"           1977

as opposed to: (exactly the same text and amount of blanks was entered below)
Young Americans 1975
Station to station 1976
Low 1977
"Heroes" 1977

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Emil's series of famous moments in film history:
Turn back, Sarah, before it's too late!

I must admit I never knew that the boards refuted multiple spaces - or if I had known, I had completely forgotten.

So as you have shown, it looks like an excellent thing to keep it in mind when creating tables.....and also any time we require indents.

Bowie in Australia 2004 | Join the Community

In reply to:

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So as you have shown, it looks like an excellent thing to keep it in mind when creating tables.....and also any time we require indents.

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But we all know that it will be the new cool thing that everyone does because it looks kindof raw and edgy. I'm just waiting for the first TW'er to post messages entirely in pre tags. A lot of real assholes around here, you know.

Peace out, dawgs.

I mentioned Bowie in this post
Monkeyboy for America
Dedicated to making pay and play politics work for once.

Post deleted by Grey_Nihilist

Close but not quite.

DIY

Whether or not it's unclear, especially as regards the blank spaces, depends on how much of a techie you are.

HTML is not designed to treat blank spaces entered with the space bar as distinct spaces. If you want to create a specified number of blank spaces, you need to use the & nbsp; (without the space after the ampersand) ASCII code. So you can make the pseudo-table if you do this, but it's cumbersome, as you need to estimate the precise number of spaces you need and code appropriately:

Young Americans 1975
Low                     1977

Also, you can't be 100% sure that every browser will render that properly. Mine does - tell me if yours doesn't.

The "pre" tag, on the other hand, does just what it says - displays what's typed exactly as is. Therefore spaces are rendered as spaces.

In a nutshell, that is.

WW

The average American walks less than 400 yards a day. The average American needs to get off his lazy ass and go for a walk -Mark Stevens