I figured out what was bothering me about the post layout, and it’s CSS.

I write these in Markdown. When they get rendered as a site, there are a few expectations to how that will work. Lets you infer how it’s supposed to look in the final render, while also allowing you to make the actual markdown text file look good and easy to read.

The standard rule is that a single line break between text in the markdown file should be ignored, and it’ll get re-flowed in the rendered version.

This is funny spaced
text
for example
purposes.

Note how there it’s written on several different lines. Instead, it should look like the paragraph below.

This is funny spaced text for example purposes.

See how it renders all on one line, with the expected line wrappings.

This was happening because the default style for the blog posts was using a CSS feature called white-space: pre-wrap which basically assumes that you want to maintain any existing spacing and line breaks. This means that it made all the linebreaks in the markdown file to be significant. There’s nothing wrong with it, it’s just unexpected. But I don’t want to have to think about layout, so I’ve turned that back to normal.

A second feature that was on was text-justify. This spread the text across a line so it will largely fill a column. In multi-column layouts, this is probably a good thing. It also allows for meaningful hyphenation at line ends. However, it makes all the paragraphs look the same! It’s too easy to lose your space. I’ve turned those off for now, since this isn’t print media. I don’t have as much to worry about.

I like how the paragraphs have a different, wobbly right edge. Makes it easier for me to read. Benefit of my own space. I can do what I like. I reserve the right to change it later. It might be fine with other adjustments too.

I was a little concerned that changing these would affect the code rendering and highlighting, that this hugo theme made quite handy:

import "fmt"

func main() {
    fmt.Println("Hello, World!")
    if true {
        fmt.Println("Very long run on sentence just to see what happens if the text needs to wrap or something like that.")
    }
}

But it looks fine to me. The renderer has too many additional structures and wrappings to make sure the syntax highlighting is correct.

I’ll take it.