Extra newline from ement-room-compose-org

[scolobb]

Hi,

I have used Ement for 3 days now and I love it! I also start having various questions of various degrees of complexity 🙂

I have just noticed that messages that I send with ement-room-compose-org include a sneaky newline, always visible on my Element Android, and not normally visible on the Element web app, but visible when I edit the message. None of these appear in Ement.

Here is a screenshot from how it appears in Element Android:

Notice the extra space between the messages due to the extra new lines.

Here is how it looks in Element web app when I edit the message:

The message looks fine when rendered outside the editing interface:

This is what I am seeing when viewing the source of one of the messages with the extra newline. I see that there is a <p> tag as well as an explicit \n.

((:id . "$fZS1UTf-DAGXHm7oyvmVqByXaGpKS73AVmw1MLF-Omo")
 (:sender . "@scolobb:marvid.fr")
 (:content (format . "org.matrix.custom.html")
	   (formatted_body
	    . "<p>\nThis will have an extra newline.</p>")
	   (msgtype . "m.text")
	   (body . "This will have an extra newline."))
 (:origin-server-ts . 1755698359839) (:type . "m.room.message")
 (:state-key) (:unsigned (transaction_id . "4063775252-1755698359"))
 (:receipts) (:local))

Finally, when I sent a formatted message from the Element web app, this is the source I see:

((:id . "$hNri_3yNYffvtiIiUGwAaMpw2loS-saJoC6nvdbZE-w")
 (:sender . "@scolobb:marvid.fr")
 (:content (msgtype . "m.text")
	   (body . "This is *not* plain text (sent from the browser).")
	   (format . "org.matrix.custom.html")
	   (formatted_body
	    . "This is <em>not</em> plain text (sent from the browser).")
	   (m.mentions))
 (:origin-server-ts . 1755702390284) (:type . "m.room.message")
 (:state-key) (:unsigned (membership . "join") (age . 994542))
 (:receipts) (:local))

This source does not contain any <p> tags or explicit \n.

I guess all of this quite clearly points to Org-to-HTML export as the culprit, and so I figured I could probably tinker with ement-room-send-message-filter and try to insert a function into the chain which would strip the <p> and the \n, but it seems kind of heavy.

Do you have any cookbook recipe for dealing this extra <p> tag and newline issue when sending messages using ement-room-compose-org?

Thanks!

[phil-s]

Is the problem with Element Android the explicit newline, or is it the fact that there's a <p> tag?

Any HTML rendering should collapse white space, so the newline shouldn't show up as an empty line; but if it's not expecting messages to be marked up as paragraphs then it absolutely might have a top margin/padding for those, even if it's the start of the message (which it could differentiate from subsequent paragraphs in CSS easily enough using parent selectors or :nth-child).

Either way, it seems to me that Element Android shouldn't render it like that.

I agree it would be nicer if the explicit newline wasn't in the message.

[scolobb]

Thanks for you quick answer @phil-s!

Is the problem with Element Android the explicit newline, or is it the fact that there's a <p> tag?

I don't know, and I wouldn't know how to send an HTML message from one of my clients having the <p> tag only.

Any HTML rendering should collapse white space, so the newline shouldn't show up as an empty line; but if it's not expecting messages to be marked up as paragraphs then it absolutely might have a top margin/padding for those, even if it's the start of the message (which it could differentiate from subsequent paragraphs in CSS easily enough using parent selectors or :nth-child).

Either way, it seems to me that Element Android shouldn't render it like that.

Oh, OK. This seems consistent with the fact that the Element web app does not seem to particularly care about whitespace (I tested with the 3 default layouts).

I have also just tried Fluffy Chat on Android to see how it renders a message with <p> and \n, and it shows an extra newline before the message, unlike Element Android :

I agree it would be nicer if the explicit newline wasn't in the message.

I guess I'll just assume for now that it's the Element Android's fault 🙂 After all, the version 1.6.44 I updated to last Monday has other weirdness like broken recording of voice messages. If this persists over multiple updates, I might play with ement-room-send-message-filter to try and remove that extra \n and maybe the <p>.

[sergiodj]

FWIW, I've noticed the same problem since I started using ement. I still haven't figured out what exactly is adding that extra newline.