Quill 2.0: Support for multiple line-breaks within a single paragraph

[dstj]

This is a modified revival of #2872 as it was closed when Quill 2.0 was released. Also related: #2469

Quote from #2872

Lines and paragraphs are not same things in typography. Usually, there's a spacing between paragraphs, which less than the height of a full line, unless there are different elements involved like figures, headings,... And, sometimes, there's a need to use multiple simple line-breaks for the same paragraph.

There can be produced output allowing multiple line-breaks within a single paragraph, like:

<p>Some text paragraph</p>
<p>
  Another text paragraph:<br/>
  with<br/>
  multiple<br/>
  lines
<p>
<p>Another paragraph</p>

Actual behavior:

Can't produce output above.

Suggested behaviour

In text editors like Microsoft Word (or CKEditor5 and TinyMCE), Shift-Enter will create a simple line break, while Enter will create a new paragraph.

#4248 tried with a custom keyboard binding, but it doesn't work because the underlying Parchment data model that does not support it.

Version
Quill 2.0.2
via ngx-quill: "^25.3.2"

[zozoh]

The key reason is that Quill uses \n to generate a new paragraph, so it doesn't have an elegant way to identify <br>. If possible, just like markdown syntax, use \n\n to generate a new paragraph, and leave \n for <br>. Then it should be very easy to support line breaks within a paragraph.

However, this seems difficult to complete in a short time, so that the author tends not to complete it. The same problem also occurs in the support of Table. Of course, this is another topic ...

[dstj]

@zozoh
Exactly, and that, unfortunately, disqualifies Quill as a serious, viable contender for Rich Text Editor replacement like CKEditor5 and TinyMCE or Froala for everything except simple use cases. :/

\n and \n\n seems like a valid solution (with a possible toggle option like enableLineBreaks: true|false maybe to avoid breaking old implementations)...

[zozoh]

@dstj
Yes, every time I thought this, I feel very sad, Quill's abstraction layer is very good, I love the Blots and related design, it is almost like I should have, but as you known few very small things prevent it from shining brightly.

[mtnadb]

.ql-editor {
white-space: normal !important;

p:empty {
&::before {
content: " ";
white-space-collapse: preserve;
}
}
}

[lsaffre]

The key reason is that Quill uses \n to generate a new paragraph, so it doesn't have an elegant way to identify <br>. If possible, just like markdown syntax, use \n\n to generate a new paragraph, and leave \n for <br>. Then it should be very easy to support line breaks within a paragraph.

However, this seems difficult to complete in a short time, so that the author tends not to complete it. The same problem also occurs in the support of Table. Of course, this is another topic ...

There is a unicode character (u2028) for representing a line break. It's called line separator there. Can't we use this?

[zozoh]

I gived up. Maybe prosemirror is a better choice for me. @lsaffre

[lsaffre]

@zozoh Thanks for sharing! Indeed prosemirror looks interesting. Maybe quill-next is a less radical solution, we started testing this approach thanks to 8lurry who did the work of making it work in Lino: https://gitlab.com/lino-framework/react