Normally, Tinderbox lets you embed html in your notes, and exports that embedded HTML without change.
Inline code examples
Sometimes, though, you want to show an example of your HTML (or some other programming language) on a web page. That means you want the HTML tags to appear as you see them in Tinderbox, i.e. you see the character sequence "<b>", not the effect of bolding some text.
Originally, setting $HTMLQuoteHTML to false let you export HTML examples in an entire note. But, sometimes, you want the example to be handled differently than the rest of the note so Tinderbox also allows these usages:
- Tinderbox respects the tags <code> and </code> when they appear within notes. HTML between these tags is always encoded so it appears as you see it, instead of being passed unchanged to the browser.
- Tinderbox also respects the tags <pre> and </pre> when they appear within notes. Inside these tags, Tinderbox adds no paragraph formatting and leaves whitespace unchanged; since the intent of the
Setting $HTMLQuoteHTML to true will override this feature - so don't mix the two!
Note that if you use <code> for a single line sample, you won't emit a wrapping
tag as Tinderbox does not emit an 'auto-paragraph' if:
- The line beings with a < character
- The line beings with a < character preceded by whitespace (space, tab, etc.)
So, if you want such a single line code example emitted as a separate paragraph, place an option+space at the end of the line after the tag. Tinderbox will detect this and add the
tags; even better, if the line starts with a tab it will use your TBX's defined indented-paragraph styling.
Whole note code samples
Alternatively, you may have a note consisting entirely of code (HTML, XML, etc) that needs to be exported verbatim, e.g. as is a boilerplate include to a larger exported page. In this case the best approach is to turn off $HTMLMarkupText (i.e. set to false). This should ensure the pages characters are exported untouched. However, characters outside the low ASCII set, such as a • may get transposed to a Unicode-style HTML entity. If you want to use $HTMLMarkupText but have paragraphs starting with *, # or • you can just set $AutomaticIndent to false.