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

[kravemir]

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.

Steps for Reproduction

1. Visit https://quilljs.com/ (demo editor),
2. Experiment a bit with line breaks (single enter press, double enter press,...),
3. Inspect class="ql-editor" component.

Expected behavior:

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

Simply: when an enter is pressed once, then a line-break is produced. When enter is pressed twice, then a new paragraph is produced.

Technically:

• when enter is pressed after text (ie. single enter press), then a new line is produced,
• when enter is pressed at the beginning of the line (ie. double enter press), then the line is converted to paragraph.
• when delete is pressed on the beginning of the line, then line is merged with previous one,
• when delete is pressed on the beginning of the paragraph, then paragraph is converted to line, and belongs to previous paragraph.

Not covered:

• how to treat multiple successive empty lines/paragraphs.

Platforms:

$ uname -a
Linux miroslav-laptop 4.15.0-58-generic #64-Ubuntu SMP Tue Aug 6 11:12:41 UTC 2019 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
$ google-chrome --version
Google Chrome 78.0.3904.108 

Version:

The published one, when this issue is written.

[markleppke]

To support this issue, here is the HTML spec relating to semantic markup: https://www.w3.org/TR/html52/textlevel-semantics.html#elementdef-br

[DarthSomebody]

+1
This is one of the most basic features that every text editor must have. Has no one written a module for that?

[npcole]

+1
This is an essential feature for digital humanities work — both for editing academic writing and for editing transcriptions of primary texts.

[npcole]

(Though whether this should be done automatically — or with a shift enter — is very much open to debate. Following most word processors, it should be the latter.)

[maxfahl]

I'd really like to see shift+enter being added to Quill. It seems the maintainers don't see this as an issue though, they have locked/closed threads discussing this feature before. There are some experimental implementation made by people, but they don't work as expected. Too bad this is not being taken seriously. I really love this editor and dislike the fact that a common thing such as this is deterring people from using it. Me included.