Comment by BrenBarn
1 day ago
The annoyances of using "soft wraps" with various kinds of tools is one of the maddening irritations of our software landscape. Inserting non-semantic newlines in content just to make things fit the screen is insane.
1 day ago
The annoyances of using "soft wraps" with various kinds of tools is one of the maddening irritations of our software landscape. Inserting non-semantic newlines in content just to make things fit the screen is insane.
It is not just to fit the screen, it also fits our line orientated version control better.
I don't know if this is suitable for large works(books), but for technical documentation I have my plain text source with one line per sentence, actually I go further than than and usually have one line per punctuation. The raw source reads a little hard but the version control diffs are much cleaner and editing is is easier. Most formats(html, troff, tex) ignore manual line returns anyway.
I think most authoring formats require a blank line to mark a paragraph. In emacs and in vim. You can easily reflow such block (and on unix there’s the fmt command).