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Just an aside: I too use this method to insert quotes as monospaced font text for contrast - but then I take the time to insert manual line breaks. You don't wa
by Noseshine 10y ago
Just an aside: I too use this method to insert quotes as monospaced font text for contrast - but then I take the time to insert manual line breaks. You don't want readers to have to do manual horizontal scrolling, and here it even has to be done three times, for each sentence.
It can be done quickly:
- If you use Chrome you can resize the text field. Set it to a width that seems just right for where you want to insert line breaks.
- Insert the initial " > " (I put a ">" in front of each line but that's just me), select it, copy it.
- Now just using keys END, DOWN-ARROW, RETURN, CTRL-V insert all necessary line-breaks. Setting the text field width causes the END key to go to exactly the right position automatically, no need to navigate the words manually. then RETURN and CTRL-V to insert the line-break and the quote-start. Repeat.
This way you can manually format even long quotes very quickly.
- tener 10y agoThanks for the tip, updated.
- throwanem 10y agoThis still requires horizontal scrolling on mobile and other narrow displays. Don't overload monospace formatting for block quotes. It is bad at them because they are not what it is for. Just quote with a leading > and let the user agent reflow text as it needs to. Everyone will know what you mean.
- Noseshine 10y agoThe actual solution would be for HN to introduce a way to add quotes. Just having > in front of regular lines sucks - the many attempts at making quotes stand out more show that this is not just a single opinion. I "overload" monospaced because there is no proper option.
- throwanem 10y agoIf you want quotes to stand out, italicize them. Again, everyone will know what you mean, and you won't break UX in a way that makes some readers more likely to ignore your comment because it's such a pain to read.
- Noseshine 10y agoItalicizing is not a good solution for quotes IMHO. I don't add the following links because that's where I got my opinion from, it's only in support. I came to my own opinion by reading a lot on the web :-) In addition, only very few people in this forum use that method for large quotes, so without consulting a style guide, it seems to me most people feel that way. https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100502220045AA9OuXG https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100502220045A... http://grammar.yourdictionary.com/punctuation/when/when-to-italicize.html http://grammar.yourdictionary.com/punctuation/when/when-to-i...
- throwanem 10y agoYour options are to italicize, to introduce with a leading >, or to abuse monospace formatting in a way that breaks the user experience. Either of the former two is better than the latter, and my experience of several years on HN is that leading > is by far most common for quoting, but if abusing monospace formatting is the way you want to do it, then by all means abuse monospace formatting to your heart's content.