Newlines problem

[Endoperez]

So, I'm a Windows user and a Dominions modder. I've never managed to get newlines working properly.

"3.2 #description &#8220;<piece of text>&#8221;
A description of what the mod does, who has created it
and so forth. Use two newlines in a row to start a new
paragraph."

The bold part doesn't work for me. I've long thought this to be due to using Notepad to do my mods, and it being incompatible with whatever unix/linux/mac newline type Dominions looks for. However, I finally tried to get the feature working by installing a different text editor (VIM - Vi IMproved 7.1), and still can't get them to work. Just what am I supposed to do with them? I've got this idea for a mod which is based heavily on descriptions, and I'd like to use a rather special format for these descriptions, and I need the newlines to work for that.

The project in question isn't yet in production or anything, I'm just checking a few sources to see if I could manage to pull this off. I've got no idea for graphics or for actuals stats as of yet, nor even any good ideas for Dom representations fitting the descriptions, and as I'm in the army now, and will have lots of responsibility in about a week, I won't have the time to start doing this for a long, long time. This might even have to wait for January.

Any way, here's a teaser. It'd be the description for a unit armed with some kind of magical weapons, which might or might not have one or more of the following abilities: poison of some sort, slay magic as Elf Bane, slay magic as Moon Blade, slay giants as Short Sword of Oberführer, decay effect (what the spell 'Bleed' causes), Additional Weakness, disease.

Heavily edited and cropped, but still recognisable as a variation of parts of Rune IX of Kalevala, Origin of Iron.

This, the origin of iron,
and of steel of light blue color.

Evil Hisi's bird, the hornet,
while the steel was being tempered,
brought the blessing of the serpent,
brought the venom of the adder,
brought the poison of the spider,
brought the stings of all the insects,
mixed them with the ore and water,
while the steel was being, tempered.

Ilmarinen, ancient blacksmith,
dipped the iron into water,
water mixed with many poisons,
thought it but the wild bee's honey;
thus he formed the steel from iron.
When he plunged it into water,
water mixed with many poisons.
When be placed it in the furnace,
angry grew the hardened iron,
broke the vow that he had taken,
ate his words like dogs and devils,
mercilessly cut his brother,
madly raged against his kindred,
caused the blood to flow in streamlets
from the wounds of man and hero.

This, the origin of iron,
and of steel of light blue color."

[Sombre]

I never got it working with notepad either, but that hasn't really caused me any problems.

[Gandalf Parker]

I think it might be because a dos program doesnt actually do 2 newlines. Its does newline/carriage-return combinations which might be causing the dom3 program to see it differently.
Just guessing.

You might be able to beat that by using the wordpad program which seems able to handle unix style files better than notepad

[Endoperez]

I've tried wordpad, but that didn't seem to work either. Should I choose some spesific kind of a text file from the list of available filetypes? As in, is there a *nix version of .txt?

[lch]

Have you tried four newlines?

If you're looking for a good text editor under Windows, I can recommend Textpad. If you are looking for something free, I think Notepad++ is. Both should be able to load and save text in *nix format.

[Endoperez]

Four newlines on Vim didn't work. I'll try Notepad++.

[Endoperez]

A-ha! I had to create a new file, not edit an existing one, but Notepad++ works now! Thanks!

There are some problems with my format of choice. The biggest being that there's lots of scrolling down to see a unit's weapons and equipment. Hopefully most units will have much shorter descriptions.

[paradoxharbinger]

windows uses 2 different characters to represent new lines, a carriage return and a line feed, which are ASCII 10 and 13 i believe. not sure about the order off the top of my head.

[Fate]

Another program I like (because it has variable syntax highlighting) is Crimson Editor. I haven't tested it with dominions yet, but it seems more unix-based (at least it doesn't auto-add .txt).

[Edi]

Crimson Editor works really well for all Dominions related stuff. All of the old Faerun map files were done with that and it reads it no problem.

As far as plain text editors go, in my opinion Notepad is the source of all evil. I'll use it if I have to, but only if I have to.