Search

Dark theme | Light theme

June 25, 2014

Awesome Asciidoctor: Keep Line Breaks in Paragraphs

Normally when we write a paragraph in Asciidoc markup the line breaks are not preserved. Multiple lines are combined into a paragraph until an empty line is found to separate paragraphs. If we want to keep line breaks we must add the plus sign (+) at the end of the line. If we generate HTML from the Asciidoc markup a line break is inserted with a <br> tag. We can also use the hardbreaks document attribute to enable or disable line breaks in paragraphs without the addition of the + symbols.

In the following Asciidoc sample we use the + sign to keep line breaks in a paragraph:

// Use + to keep line breaks in paragraph.
A sample paragraph +
with line breaks +
applied using the _+_ symbol.

A sample paragraph 
without line breaks,
because the _+_ symbol 
is not used.

We get the following result if we use the HTML backend:

We can also use the hardbreaks attribute:

:hardbreaks:

A sample paragraph 
with line breaks.
Although the _+_ symbol 
is not used, but the
document attribute 
*:hardbreaks:* is set.

// Disable hardbreaks for reminder of document.
:!hardbreaks:

If we generate HTML we get the following result:

Samples written with Asciidoctor 0.1.4.