Markdown oddities

[W_Vann_Hall]

The forum software has an innate dislike for horizontal rules. None of the typical Markdown encodings work

[at which point I started entering codes to demonstrate their not working, until it finally dawned on me the primary indicator of their not working is that you can’t see them. Suffice to say neither — (3 hyphens), *** (3 asterisks), nor ___ (3 underscores) on the left margin will trigger a horizontal rule; likewise, the 10- hyphen block inserted with Ctrl-Alt-R (as suggested above) also disappears.

However, entering even a single hyphen on the line immediately beneath some text does interesting things to the previous text block.

And while I have you here, what’s up with a preformatted (code) text block that doesn’t retain leading white space, eliminating indentation? Pretty much wipes out the reason for quoting code.

Thanks!

[W_Vann_Hall]

It’s since dawned on me the problem with a single hyphen causing the preceding line to do

this

is simply Markdown’s ‘setext-style’ header support; the Markdown engine in Airtable does the same thing (although it does handle horizontal rules correctly). I’m not sure how Markdown is supposed to differentiate between text followed by a horizontal rule and text meant to be Header2, but I’m sure it’s been haggled out somewhere.

On the other hand, I have no idea why entering - - &mdasah; that’s [hyphen][space][hyphen] — results in this:

Hold on; it seems to be a somewhat broken bulleted list.

• Bullet 1
• • Bullet 1.a
• • Bullet 1.b

• Bullet 2

[W_Vann_Hall]

…annnnnd I just now discovered the forum indeed does handle Markdown-encoded horizontal rules correctly, properly inserting

hyphen-

---

asterisk-

---

and underscore-

---

based horizontal rules as expected.

It’s just that my Windows 7 machine doesn’t display them, for some reason; they appear fine under Windows 10.

So I guess my only remaining question is why leading spaces (including unbreakable spaces, I learned tonight) are stripped from code/preformatted text blocks…

Anyone?