exercism/website-copy

Mentor notes layout: Suggested comments should wrap, otherwise not readable

Opened this issue · 5 comments

corneliusroemer commented

The suggested comments in mentor notes are useful, but not really usable, because they are in non-wrapping code-blocks.

There are two possibilities:

  1. Make line breaks every 40 chars or so
  2. Not display them as code blocks

As it stands, it's quite bad, see how this appears on my 16" MBP display, it overflows a lot:

image

IsaacG commented

On the other hand, I find having them on a single line makes them much easier to copy/paste into a bulleted list of suggestions.

corneliusroemer commented
BethanyG commented

@corneliusroemer - Highlighting a part of the text triggers a sideways scrollbar in the UI (at least it does on my MBP running Monterey, and did when it ran Mojave):

image

That being said, its not ideal, but its not entirely cut off either.

corneliusroemer commented

@BethanyG yes, it does scroll, but it's still pretty much unreadable from a UX standpoint - yes I could technically read it, but in practice I won't, because it's a lot of pain. Easier to copy/paste to a Google doc to do that.

image

For code, this is sort of OK, though it would be good to have all code have max line width of say 60-80 chars and the box to be that width, in usual viewports.

For text that is 600 chars wide, it just shouldn't live in the code fences the way they're implemented right now. Does anyone actually read them as they are? Scrolling horizontally?

This is the whole text:

For a more compact and less repetitive solution you can build a translation map (typically done with a dict though [str.maketrans()][str-maketrans] is also an option). That way you don't need to have another if for each letter.

The translation dict is a good candidate for a module-level constant. There is not need to have it recreated every time the function is called.

Python is a pretty high level language with all sorts of string support. Can you come up with a solution that doesn't require someone pull out an ASCII table to read/modify?

Here's the file in question: https://github.com/exercism/website-copy/blob/main/tracks/python/exercises/rna-transcription/mentoring.md

IsaacG commented

They are optimized for copy paste over reading. The code blocks make it easier to have backticks and other markdown meta chars embedded in the text.

If you want to reformat that to not live in a code block but still contain markdown meta chars which can be copy pasted, I'd be happy to see improvements to these notes.