It seems like you're uncomfortably mixing two different idioms here.

Perl's formats are designed to produce a simple formatted output on character devices (fixed-width, usually). These are used when the output device has no formatting capability of its own.

But you're mixing HTML with it. Unless you're using preformatted text of some sort (like using <PRE>) and trying to make it look right using spaces, the spaces that are generated by the Perl formatted output will mostly be ignored.

Wouldn't it be easier and cleaner (not to mention probably causing less network overhead) if you used HTML's own formatting capabilities to display this stuff as you want? Depending on your environment (intranet/Internet) you may consider using style sheets, which give quite a bit of flexibility for formatting.


In reply to Re: Strange @ appearance by bikeNomad
in thread Strange @ appearance by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.