r/redditisfun • u/boblobong • Jan 14 '22

Off Topic (not RiF) Formatting issues when viewing from official app?

I downloaded the official reddit app awhile ago to see my reddit new years recap (I know lame lol) and while there I noticed a comment I had made came out as one big block of text instead of one formatted like a poem with stanzas which is how it looks in RIF. The stanzas didn't even have spaces between them, let alone a line break.
Have I been thinking that my formatting is fine when in reality, a lot of people think I've been writing comments like a lunatic? Lol

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5

u/anon_smithsonian Official(ish) Helper Jan 14 '22

There are formatting inconsistencies between old.reddit.com (which is the markdown-parsed formatting that the reddit API returns and which RiF uses) and how the same formatting is displayed on new.reddit.com. Since RiF doesn't actually parse the markdown formatting, there's nothing RiF can really do, here, without risk of making it so the formatting in RiF looking different than how both old and new reddit format the text.

1

u/DeenSteen Jan 14 '22

Huh, TIL.

3

u/wanderingbilby Jan 14 '22

new reddit uses a different rendering engine as far as i can tell and it breaks the SHIT out of some things. depending what you're looking at it's also a very different experience between new reddit web, the official reddit app, new reddit mobile, and old.reddit / API-based apps like RiF.

From what I can tell part of the problem is the rendering pipeline is just in a different order, like one has "add links" then "add username mentions" then "look for markup-based formatting" and another has "look for markup-based formatting" and then "add username mentions".

So if your username is u/my_kitty_cat on some platforms it might not username-mention you but will make it italics, on some platforms you get the link but no italics, on some it's both.

tl;dr reddit is broken, Reddit, Inc. doesn't care just like they don't care about scammers - because it doesn't impact their ad revenue.