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Enterprise Architect Notes field (pseudo HTML) format

Johann
For our documentation we extract information from Notes fields of our UML tool Enterprise Architect (from Sparx Systems).

They have invented a crappy format that is somewhere between plain text and HTML. That is

  • white space characters (space and newline) are significant
  • some HTML tags, like <b> or <ul> for lists are supported

- - -
Johann

Johann
sorry, the description was not complete when I hit the post button...

An example for the Notes field HTML is:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <title>Title</title>
    <style>
      div.note { white-space:pre-wrap }
      div.note ul {
        white-space: normal;
        margin: 0;
      }
      div.note li { white-space: pre-wrap }
    </style>
  </head>
  <body>
    <div class="note" title="Note">This document describes all relevant information for the
 
<ul>
	<li>Use Cases</li>
	<li>Software Architecture</li>
	<li>Software Design</li>
	<li>Test Specification *)</li>
	<li>Requirements Matrix</li>
	<li>List of all project documents specifying the referenced release versions.</li>
</ul>

*) For technical reasons, the release test results cannot be included in this document.</div>
  </body>
</html>


With the release versions of Prince (e.g. 14.2), the HTML rendered fine with the CSS styles in the <style> field. Below the list there was one blank line.

With the latest build versions of Prince (e.g. Prince 20220808) there is an extra blank line below the list - and two blank lines altogether!

I know that this is compatible with rendering of current browsers, and I it also correct as there are actually two newline characters!

But I still require the old behavior - is there any chance to revert to the old rendering?

- - -
Johann

mikeday
I think we have to stick with the new behaviour for consistency with browsers, but what about applying "margin-bottom: -1.14em" to the list? Or alternatively using JavaScript to chop one newline?
Johann
OK - I understand this!

Applying margins in this way sounds like a good idea, I will try it.
Else, we could remove the newline in our XSLT code (should be a little bit faster than Javascript).

- - -
Johann

Johann
For a CSS-only solution we must handle the lists at the end of the container:

div.note ul:last-child { margin-bottom:0; }


The only problem comes from plain text nodes that follow the list! This is a situation where we would require the :last-node selector - but it is still not standardized :-(

Mozilla implemented this long ago: see :-moz-last-node

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Johann