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I love the idea that the agents are doing the exact same ridiculous retrospective as we are. ^_^ I also admired how well you dealt with the issue of the preserved badfic cutting off before the agents show up.

hS

Having made a return to the board, it was only right that I made a return to the Classroom as well. With it being the twentieth anniversary of the PPC it seemed only fitting that I do my bit to honour that, with my return, and as such I present Agent Sasha Fontwell and the class of 2022 in a story that could only be titled PPC+20.

... the parser is literally replacing "two space characters + one new line" with "<br>". It doesn't matter what you hit, just what prints out.

But it's also eliminating double spaces elsewhere. I wrote two in these gaps. And three in these. And ten here.

I think your parser just really hates multiple spaces in a row. ^_^ Though  nbsp  still  works. A quick check shows that it's just rendered as a non-space character, so space-nbsp-space will make three spaces, but any extra spaces either side will be blipped.

I'm still reasonable sure I got my phone to do autofull-stop + two visible spaces and not convert to new line, but I can't replicate that behaviour, so maybe not.

hS

It's totally unpredictable - sometimes hitting space twice gives two spaces, sometimes a full stop and one space, sometimes a full stop and no spaces. One test, I got full stop-space, deleted the full stop and added an extra space, and it didn't work. Another time, after full stop-space, I hit space again and it did nothing the first time, then added a second space when I hit it the fourth time overall.

My guess is that some or all of these spaces are actually coding differently. Could they be going in as nbsp and so not triggering the newline behaviour?

Typical (but not guaranteed) behaviour :

One space bar hit.

Two. Space. Bar. Hit.

Three. Space. Bar. Hit.

Four.
Space.
Bar.
Hit.

hS

... and Lindsey stumbles a little, her earlier overconfidence replaced by a glimmer of fear.

"Why are you stopping?" She asked, glancing over at Mina and wiping her chocolate covered hands on the dungarees she wore their fight of seconds before seemingly forgotten, as the float suddenly, and completely judders to a halt.

In case it matters,
I'm using a Windows laptop running Chrome,
typing two spacebar spaces at the end of each line.

And it seems to work! Yay!

~Neshomeh

“I’m the better agent, I’m not crying, and I do win. And you—“

She carefully moved the chocolate so that it was out of Lindsey’s reach.

“—can’t have any more chocolate.”

((I think that at some point Mina’s bad luck powers might affect her. Maybe.

—Ls))

This. is. the. result. of. me. double. spacing.

—Ls.

Lindsey looked at Mina, then down at the broken RA, and then back up at Mina again. "Wow, did you just destroy your RA just to prove you're better than an eight year old? Good job, you win." Lindsey gave a mock bow, channeling far too much of her father. "You're clearly the better Agent."

worked
when
I
did
it.

So I have no clue why it wouldn't work for you... I mean, I don't doubt there IS a reason, to be clear, I just don't know what.

She threw the RA onto the float’s floor and jumped, crushing it.

“See? Your uncle doesn’t know anything!”

"My Uncle Shawn always says you can tell the new agents because they're excited by the things," she said giving the kind of cocky look only a self assured eight year old can actually manage. "Then they wind up crying when they break them."

Lindsey held her ground, standing there staring at the young agent, trying to look stern and serious, an appearance that was somewhat marred by the volume of chocolate around her lips.

((I didn't want to assume, just figured I'd pass on the information in case :) ))

“Who’s giving out the chocolate here?” Mina asked. “Me! And I think you ought to understand being ‘too young’.”

She pulled a RA out of her pocket. “See this? It’s a Remote Activator. Only real agents get these.”

Mina gestured to her flash patch. “And real agents get flash patches as well.”

((Mina didn’t spend much time in the Nursery, due to . . . issues she caused, so I don’t think she’d know Lindsey.))

"Aren't you a little young to be a real agent?" Lindsey asked with an unimpressed look on her face, but still taking the offered chocolate anyway and stuffing it straight into her mouth. "My mum's down there," Lindsey added pointing an impossibly chocolatey hand towards Sasha in the crowd. "Sasha Fontwell, she was a floater but she's personnel now and trains lots of young agents."

There were far more words that were rendered unintelligible by the quantities of chocolate in her mouth, but eventually she managed to form them again. "I'm going to be a great agent one day, I've already been on lots of missions," she finished, somewhat deliberately failing to point out that lots meant two, and that on both occasions she'd snuck onto a mission without her parents permission and had gotten into rather large amounts of trouble afterwards.

((She's eight. From what I've seen of Mina she may know some of this, so here's the exposition: She was born in Headquarters to Agents Steven and Sasha Fontwell, who have been agents since 2011 and had spent some time in the nursery before that.))

“Here want some gummy bears? Or gummy worms? Or chocolate? I love chocolate! Oh, and we have caramel!”

She grabbed each treat as she mentioned it and shoved it into Lindsey’s arms. “I’m on this float ‘cause it’s fun! That was my partner. He left ‘cause he’s boring. I’m a reeeeeal live agent! Well, I think I’m alive. Who’s your mummy?”

((How old is Lindsey again? Mina’s 15.

—Ls))

Sasha stepped aside, rolling her eyes and offering Carlisle the face that was usually only reserved for Steven when he was in trouble.

"Well, it's always nice to meet an agent with manners," she muttered under her breath, turning her attention to the float where Lindsey was still talking to the young agent.

“I don’t know who you are, and I don’t care. Now vacate of my path posthaste!”

((So much for “somewhat” abrasive. And I didn't think this was going on at Headquarters—but it makes more sense if it is, so I’ll roll with it.

—Ls))

I suppose that’s better than nothing.

(Wait, it doesn’t work.)

What I mean is that when formatting plain-text documents, it's common for people to word-wrap by hand (well, they use automated tools usually, but the wrapping is physically present in the file). As a result, Markdown doesn't interpret a single newline as a break because that would break on people's text documents (Markdowns is very commonly used on things like READMEs, which tend to do this...).

I'm not sure if it's feasible to alter the markdown parser to interpret a single newline as <br>, because we don't actually handle that directly: we're using redcarpet, which is written by other people. And while it is customizable, I don't yet know how easy or hard it would be to make that change.

While I was researching this, however, I did come across a way to actually get a linebreak in markdown without resorting to HTML tags: turns out, if you end a line with
two
or
more
spaces (that is, " "),
a linebreak will be inserted for you.

Lindsey grinned at the young agent. "I'm Lindsey," she said proudly, "my daddy works in the field and my mummy is one of the trainers. Are you a trainee agent? Are you in mummy's class? Why are you up on a float? Who was that rude man?"

She paused in her pile of questions for a moment, tilting her head to one side and looking closely at Mina. "What type of candy do you have?"

Sasha watched the somewhat abrasive older man as he moved away, tugging the stray apostrophe out of her hair with a sigh. "It's amazing what you pick up surrounded by kids all day," she moaned.

Without moving from his path she squared her shoulders, putting on her best teacher voice. "I think you mean 'get out of my way PLEASE' Agent Carlisle. Field agents have to put up with unspeakable things while in the Word Worlds, and therefore deserve a little politeness when at Headquarters, wouldn't you agree?"

Meanwhile, on the ground...

“I am known as Carlisle Cressington. Now please, get out of my way.” He walked past her, then turned around. “By the way, you have a stray apostrophe.”

((Hopefully that’s understandable.))