Escaped newlines

Thanks to a contribution from Nicolas, MultiMarkdown has an additional syntax to indicate a line break. The usual approach for Markdown is “space-space-newline” — two spaces at the end of the line. For some users, this causes problems:

• the trailing spaces are typically invisible when glancing at the source, making it easy to overlook them
• some users’ text editors modify trailing space (IMHO, the proper fix for this is a new text editor…)

Nicolas submitted a patch that enables a new option that interprets “\” before a newline as a marker that a line break should be used:

This is a line.\
This is a new line.

To enable this feature, use the following option:

multimarkdown --escaped-line-breaks file.txt

If this option is not enabled, then the default behavior will be to treat the newline as an escaped character, which results in it simply appearing as a newline character in the output. This means that the default behavior is the same as if the “\” is not in the source file.