Remove extra line breaks in app description on F-Droid

[Korb]

Please remove unnecessary line breaks:

[niccokunzmann]

Thanks! This looks like it is from F-Droid.org - where did you take the screenshot? Is it the website or the app?

Here is the description: https://github.com/spaceapi-community/my-hackerspace/blob/main/metadata/en-US/full_description.txt

Would you like to do the change?

[Korb]

This looks like it is from F-Droid.org - where did you take the screenshot? Is it the website or the app?

F-Droid 1.22.0

Would you like to do the change?

As I understand it, this is an old and quite common feature of processing application descriptions:

2017-07-18 "Line breaks are stripped from Fastlane descriptions"
2018-06-30 "Additional linebreaks in lists in package desriptions"
2020-10-12 "How to reduce vertical space between list items in HTML app description?"
2020-11-07 "Description: Remove line breaks"
2022-12-04 "Odd word wrap in F-Droid’s description (‘F-Droid’ repo)"

I would assume this is a bug specific to F-Droid itself, but many other apps' descriptions display correctly - no line breaks in the middle of sentences, and no unnecessary spacing in lists.

Would you like to do the change?

We need to understand why exactly this problem arises.

[niccokunzmann]

Nice research. It seems there might be help on the forum/issue tracker for that. Would you create a post there and come back here with a link to it?

[Korb]

There is a workaround to solve the problem. Instead of the current

<p>View information about hackerspaces and makerspaces registered in the
<a href="https://spaceapi.io/">SpaceAPI</a> directory. This includes:</p>

<ul>
    <li>Location and contact information</li>
    <li>Opening status</li>
    <li>Sensor values</li>
    <li>A widget displaying the current open/closed status on the Android home screen</li>
    <li>...and much more!</li>
</ul>

<strong>History</strong>

<p>This app was originally developed in 2012 by @rorist from the FIXME Lausanne hackspace.
In 2021, the app was transferred to the SpaceAPI community repositories and is now
mainly being developed by members of Coredump.</p>

in full_description.txt use

<p>View information about hackerspaces and makerspaces registered in the SpaceAPI directory. This includes:</p>
<ul><li>Location and contact information</li><li>Opening status</li><li>Sensor values</li><li>A widget displaying the current open/closed status on the Android home screen</li><li>...and much more!</li></ul>
<strong>History</strong>
<p>This app was originally developed in 2012 by @rorist from the FIXME Lausanne hackspace. In 2021, the app was transferred to the SpaceAPI community repositories and is now mainly being developed by members of Coredump.</p>

"All About Descriptions, Graphics, and Screenshots":

a with href is currently allowed, but might be removed without notice.
(…)
Note that a line break will automatically be converted to a br tag.

This will make the text a little more difficult to edit, but will get the description on F-Droid looking right.

[niccokunzmann]

I would be ok with merging this.. Then, when there is a next release, we can have a look at what it looks like. I believe that the full_description.txt is also used on Google.

[Korb]

ℹ "Google Play app description formatting" — I understand that Google has not fully documented the formatting capabilities of app descriptions. Some things were discovered experimentally. I hope this note will be useful to you.