Pardon me,
I'd just like to step in here to point out that css-discuss is not
for arguments about typographical preferences. It exists to help
people understand how to use CSS to do what they want to do, or else
to understand why it's difficult or impossible to do so. There have
been some suggestions for Chris, which he is now free to take or
leave. Telling him that what he wants is wrong doesn't help anyone.
(And yes, this is true for everything. Even if someone says "I
want to prevent the user from changing the text size", it does no
good to tell them they're wrong to want that. It does a world of
good to explain why that isn't in any way possible, because then they
learn something about the medium.)
The people who suggested 'white-space: pre' were on to something,
but as others pointed out, that prevents any word-wrapping. So what
Chris really needs is a setting that preserves whitespace while
allowing word-wrapping. Et voila:
p {white-space: pre-wrap;}
This combines the whitespace preservation of a 'pre' element with the
word-wrapping of a non-'pre' element. See
http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/text.html#propdef-white-space for somewhat
confusing details. Or, if you have a copy, hit up pages 151-152 of
the second edition of my O'Reilly book. The table on page 152 is
missing a value ('pre-line') but that's something I hope will be
corrected in the forthcoming third edition.
As for browser support, here's a test page:
http://meyerweb.com/eric/css/tests/white-space.html
The verdict: pretty much nobody supports it, so it's a great idea but
is currently of no practical value. So we're left with the
suggestions that were seen earlier in the thread, most of which
involve structural hacking of one type or another.
Let's keep things moving in the direction of finding solutions, or
else drop the thread. Thank you.
--
Eric A. Meyer (http://meyerweb.com/eric/), List Chaperone
"CSS is much too interesting and elegant to be not taken seriously."
-- Martina Kosloff (http://mako4css.com/)
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