> Text after a blank line that is indented by two or more spaces is formatted as code.

https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

  crimes ↑
         │
   10.0  ┤                                           ● Airport burger
         │                                      ╭──────────────╮
    8.0  ┤                                      │  theft arc   │
         │                                      ╰──────────────╯
    6.0  ┤                         ● Five Guys
         │
    4.0  ┤              ● Food truck burger
         │
    2.0  ┤      ● McBurger
         │
    0.0  ┤ ● Homemade burger
         │
         └───────┬─────────┬─────────┬─────────┬─────────→ price
                $2        $8        $14       $22       $38

  ┌────────────────────┬────────┬──────────────┬────────────────────┐
  │ burger             │ price  │ crime index  │ expected behavior  │
  ├────────────────────┼────────┼──────────────┼────────────────────┤
  │ Homemade burger    │   $2   │          0.0 │ law-abiding citizen│
  │ McBurger           │   $6   │          1.4 │ steals extra napkin│
  │ Food truck burger  │  $11   │          3.1 │ lies about hunger  │
  │ Five Guys          │  $18   │          6.2 │ financial crime    │
  │ Airport burger     │  $34   │          9.7 │ enters villain arc │
  └────────────────────┴────────┴──────────────┴────────────────────┘

  conclusion: burger inflation is a gateway condiment

Thanks, so in this case the value of "code fomatting" is using a fixed-width font ?

The next question is where did the "ASCII-art" graph and table come from? Are there sites to generate these?

The code formatting puts the content into a <pre> which preserves spaces, indentation and line breaks.

Just built a tool for that: https://krysoph.github.io/UnicodeData/

It is a single html file with no dependencies, it takes json data and turns into unicode charts.

Source: https://github.com/Krysoph/UnicodeData

Neat!

If I use your tool and "Copy HN-ready" and paste here then it works, but oddly if I then edit the post the formatting is lost.

Also, if I just manually post, starting with a blank line, followed by a couple of lines starting with two spaces (e.g. " aaa", " bbb"), then I'm not getting the <pre> code formatting. Any idea what I might be doing wrong?

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