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[OCLUG-Tech] web app for adding spaces to front of text lines?

  • Subject: [OCLUG-Tech] web app for adding spaces to front of text lines?
  • From: John C Nash <nashjc [ at ] uottawa [ dot ] ca>
  • Date: Fri, 07 Oct 2011 13:19:02 -0400
I have a wiki that has instructions for several hundreds of folk dances. The simplest way
for folk to put these in is as plain text, then use the "grey box" wiki feature to
maintain a monospaced font, as it helps to give the A, B and C parts of the music and the
bar counts for each figure -- a very crude tabular format. For those not familiar, putting
2 spaces (some specs say 1 is enough) creates a typewriter like text box on Mediawiki
(Wikipedia software).

On my own machines, I have a command line tool in Perl that does this job to all lines of
a file. However, for my wiki users, it would be nice to have a link on the wiki that opens
a new tab with a text box and a button that will add the spaces to the text in the box.
Then the material can be copied and used in the wiki page. I'm sure someone must have done
this before, but finding such a beast (or even thinking of the right search terms) is
non-trivial. I'd welcome pointers or some prototype HTML/Javascript or whatever. I'm sure
it is not that difficult, but though I've done some php, I've no expertise in Javascript.

Best, JN