Replace <span> with <font> to avoid reseting font-family

[msaraiva]

When converting the generated HTML to EPUB, the font-family information is lost. Here's an example from the Ecto documentation:

The font for <code> should be monospaced in both cases but it only works for the html version on the left.

I've tried to set the font-family for the <span> nodes in makeup.less and even tried to set it inline using style. It worked for things like color and font-size but not for the font-family. Maybe somebody with better css skills might figure out a way to do that.

Apparently, using <font> instead of <span> here fixes the issue without messing with the html version:

Now, with <font>, the epub version uses the monospaced font as expected:

In case there's no other solution and you think this should be addressed this way, let me know. I'll be glad to create a PR.

Cheers.

[josevalim]

Unfortunately the font tag is deprecated. But any other inline tag works, as long as it does not have a default markup (for example, em wouldn't work because we can't remove the italic). My suggestion is to make this an option in makeup and then we can change ExDoc to use any of the new tags. I would use the samp tag, it is not the most semantically precise but unfortunately we don't have any option on this matter.

[tmbb]

My suggestion is to make this an option in makeup and then we can change ExDoc to use any of the new tags.

You can write a new formatter right now that uses whatever tag you want instead of the <span> tag. But I can add support for other tags directly in the default formatter too.

[josevalim]

@tmbb we would like to keep everything as is, except the tag, so what about a :tag option that defaults to :span?

[tmbb]

That sounds good to me. But that would require adding new options to ExDoc so that ExDoc could feed that option into Makeup.

[tmbb]

Maybe a config option like:

docs: [
  # ...
  tag: fn :epub -> "samp"; :html -> "span" end,
  # ...
]

[josevalim]

@tmbb i was not planning to expose it to users but rather something internal. I was also thinking about using "samp" across the board. It is less work/code. Thoughts?

[tmbb]

@tmbb i was not planning to expose it to users but rather something internal.

Ok, that's trivial then.

I was also thinking about using "samp" across the board. It is less work/code. Thoughts?

I have no problem with that. I can add support for different tags and release a 0.9.0 version and make ExDoc dependent on that version. That way, ExDoc will depend on a Makeup version which already supports the lexer registry, so that you can add new lexers to the deps to support more programming languages (this would be much cooler if I had actually written some complete lexers besides the Elixir one, but I've been busy with other things)

[josevalim]

Sounds great. We will try to get a PR going, thanks! :)

[msaraiva]

Awesome. I'll start working on it!

[josevalim]

Btw, I just noticed that elixir-lang.org ebooks have the same problem, so once the fix is merged, I will move Elixir ebooks to also use makeup. :D