Just a me-too, to calibrate the level of annoyance.
 
However, I've been resigned to it, mostly because I think I agree with Brandon that fixing it is fraught with more than annoyance.  But perhaps not; perhaps one could toss together a Radeox macro that would, like the {pre} and {code} macros, generate HTML that honored ordinary typewriter-like formatting and didn't collapse whitespace, but not ignore the wiki syntax.
 
I've actually had more trouble with making sure that #included files didn't get rendered more than once, with the result that paragraph tags generated for blank lines caused syntax errors in {pre} text that was later parsed by javascript or CSS, but again I've been more or less resigned to it, as to many such annoyances that almost inevitably result from mixing languages in the same document.
 
A humorous (now...!) example is what happened when I opened a document with the single line
Hi.
I still don't know what caused it, but it didn't look anything like I expected...
brain[sic]
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Esbach, Brandon [mailto:Esbachb@tycoelectronics.com]
Sent: Thursday, July 27, 2006 10:14 AM
To: xwiki-users@objectweb.org
Subject: RE: [xwiki-users] line breaks

Ok, this is gonna be longwinded and boring to most of you out there I reccon (and sorry Duke if you know this already, just ignore it in that case):
 
This is an HTML thing which affects all browsers - not just for xwiki, but any web application under normal circumstances, for text rendered by the browser.
Why this happens is fairly simple (ok, dusty memory but here's a stab at it).  Generally speaking, any spaces (and characters that result in "space" such as line breaks, tabs, etc); are regarded as "whitespace" in html.  Whitespace is ignored when there is more than one single whitespace character - so you could add a bunch of tabs, spaces, linebreaks, etc between a word, and it will be regarded as one single space.
Putting in specific codes tells the HTML engine what you're wanting to do.  For example:
Line1     Line2 will become Line1 Line2
-But-
Line1    Line2 will become Line1    Line2 (  is the code for non-breaking-space)
 
As the text is rendered by the browser, there is not much you can do to change it
I guess one could wrap text into a non-HTML rendering object perhaps, like a textarea - but note that anything you do to change this, affects rendering of the page; and could unexpectedly break flexibility elsewhere
 

From: Duke Tantiprasut [mailto:duketantiprasut@gmail.com]
Sent: 27 July 2006 15:58
To: xwiki-users@objectweb.org
Subject: [xwiki-users] line breaks

Hi All,

Does any find that the way line breaks are handled are a bit counter intuitive. For example, if I enter:

line1
line2

you get:

line1line2

so to get results that you would normally expect, you would have to do something like:

line1<br/>
line2<br/>

which is pretty ugly. I thought I can live with it but it's starting to bug me too much.

Suggestions?

Duke