Issue: line breaks in Description (formatting)

[MrAudio 22]

I've wanted to address this for a long time, but I had a higher priority issue that I wanted to focus on first, and that is now solved (hurray!), so it's time for my next issue - this one should be very minor by comparison.

 

In the Description field, MOST platforms do not recognize line breaks - but some do, as I've discovered. The web interface, the Android TV interface, and the Apple TV interface all ignore line breaks, but strangely enough the Amazon Fire interface displays them correctly.

I realize many people won't care about this, and that many movie/title descriptions are barely a sentence long, but others are several paragraphs, and it can also be helpful to add notes - such as: what is the difference between the director's cut and the theatrical release. This is a lot less effective when everything is displayed as one continuous paragraph - the lack of formatting makes it easy to miss things and just looks jumbled and messy.

I'm FAR from being a coder, but I did figure out that putting a < br > (without spaces - a line break code) will force a line break... but not only is this manual work very tedious, but on the few platforms where it displays correctly, the line break code is displayed on the screen. That's better than one big paragraph, but still less than desirable.

So, would it be possible to code the interface on all platforms (or, at least, the biggest ones) to respect and properly display line breaks, so that what's in the NFO files is displayed correctly on the screen (and so I don't have to do the manual work-around of hard-coding line-breaks)?

Thank you so very much!

Edited December 2, 2021 by MrAudio

[Happy2Play 9785]

That is the issue.  There is no universal way that works on all platforms.

[Luke 42086]

br is probably your best bet for now, but yes I agree we should look at improving this to make it easier.

[MrAudio 22]

Granted that's true, but (and, again, NOT a coder here) I would think that this would be a fairly common problem (properly formatting text pulled from other platforms) and that the clients should be able to handle the translation with a bit of code, no? It's only needed in the Description field, and - I would imagine - this is something that wouldn't be that hard to fix in the clients. I realize that there are a couple of dozen different clients at this point, but even if you limit it to the top 5 platforms, that would be a big help. Those would be (I'm guessing):

• Web browser (let's say Chrome).
• Emby Theater.
• Android TV/Google TV
• TVOS (Apple TV)
• Roku

I would imagine this would cover 90% of users. Of course if someone wants to fix the Samsung Tizen apps or the LG WebOS apps and such, that's great too.

This just doesn't seem to me like it should be that hard to solve - especially compared to something like getting the People folder issues sorted out. Maybe I'm wrong and it's much harder than it seems, but having worked pretty heavily on computers for 30+ years, it just doesn't seem that it would be all that difficult in relative terms.

[ebr 16195]

Hi.  <br/> should be supported now in Roku and Android TV - although it may only be in the beta versions at this point.

[rbjtech 5285]

4 minutes ago, ebr said:

Hi.  <br/> should be supported now in Roku and Android TV - although it may only be in the beta versions at this point.

Ah really ?  Excellent ..

I've been toying with this problem as well for a while and never found a workable solution - gonna give this a try now .. Thanks.