Newlines ("\n") get lost and replaced with a whitespace

[Nigel]

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Newlines seem to get lost when creating an attributed string using DownStyler and get replaced with a whitespace

What did you do?

let string = "Test\nTest"
let down = Down(markdownString: string)
do {
    let attributedString = try down.toAttributedString(styler: DownStyler(configuration: .testConfiguration)
    print(attributedString.string)
}

"Test Test"

What did you expect to happen?

print(attributedString.string)

"Test\nTest"

Before this we used a stylesheet which didn't cause this issue. I've tried replacing newlines by double newlines but that renders two newlines causing too much spacing.

[John Nguyen]

Hi @ndemie , so there is a specific option to use to treat these "soft breaks" (what you're getting) as "hard breaks" (what you want). By default, all single newlines are considered soft breaks. You want to pass in this option to the parser, so something like:

let attributedString = try down.toAttributedString(.hardBreaks, styler: DownStyler(configuration: .testConfiguration)

Let me know how it goes.

[Nigel]

That fixes it, thanks!

[Nigel]

Multiple breaks still seem to get lost though.

Test\nTest\n\nTest
gets rendered as

Test
Test
Test

while I would expect

Test
Test

Test

Any solution for this @johnxnguyen?

[Nigel]

Also, unrelated (so let me know if you want this in a seperate issue), but none of the custom glyph's seem to get rendered for me e.g. codeBlockBackground, quoteStripe and thematicBreak. Any clue where the issue could be?

[John Nguyen]

@ndemie those custom attributes require the use of the DownLayoutManager, which understands what they are and is capable of drawing them in the text view. In short, you need to insert an instance of this object in your text field stack. Check out the implementation of DownTextView, or open a new issue and we can discuss it in more detail there.

[John Nguyen]

@ndemie regarding the line break issue, I'll need to try it out myself and do some debugging, not sure if it's an issue with the parsing or the styling. I have a bit of a backlog of things to do for this repo so I won't be able to jump on this immediately. Feel free to come back and remind me if there's no activity here.

[applypost]

Multiple breaks isn't working for me either with the solution.

Is the fix still in the backlog?

[Nigel]

Any update on this @johnxnguyen?

[Nigel]

Hi @johnxnguyen, it's been a while. I was wondering if you had the chance to take a look at this yet?

[Silence]

Do you still have time to fix this issue? @johnxnguyen

[YBJust]

I have encountered the same problem, and this problem has a great impact on me. Do you have time to solve it? Thanks very much!

[Silvan Dähn]

Running into this issue as well, is this currently unsupported or are there ways to work around this @johnxnguyen? Hope your doing well btw, has been a while!

[Silvan Dähn]

I was able to fix rendering multiple line breaks by adjusting my custom styler to style paragraphs accordingly.

open func style(paragraph str: NSMutableAttributedString) {
    let style = NSMutableParagraphStyle()
    style.paragraphSpacing = 20
    str.addAttributes([.paragraphStyle: style], range: NSRange(location: 0, length: str.length))
}

[John Nguyen]

Hi all, apologies for the long delay, I have not had any capacity to work on the project for a long time. Having said that I'm trying to find some time to address current issues.

Coming back to

Multiple breaks still seem to get lost though.

Test\nTest\n\nTest gets rendered as

Test
Test
Test

while I would expect

Test
Test

Test

Any solution for this @johnxnguyen?

@ndemie I think that the markdown Test\nTest\n\nTest is equivalent to

Test
Test

Test

which according to the Commonmark spec, all multiple empty lines between paragraphs are ignored. The spec also says that if you want hard line breaks to create extra spaces in between, you would write:

Test\
Test\
\
\
\
Test

which would render as

Test
Test



Test

Could you please try with this markdown syntax and see if you still have issues?

cc @SilenceLove @YBJust @daehn