Text reflow woes (or: I want bullets back!)y
Brian Evans b__m__e at mailfence.com
Mon Dec 16 01:53:32 GMT 2019
I believe, once again, we are wading into territory where wrapping
and reflowing are being conflated.
I do not know of any client that scrolls horizontally and I do not
imagine people will begin writing them since they would have
to code that from scratch rather than let their terminal handle
wrapping and scrolling. So wrapping seems like it will be a
part of most clients.
Wrapping, for our purposes, can be thought of as adding
newlines to text to fit a width (I agree that viewport/termwidth
makes sense in most situations).
Reflow seems to be the opposite of wrapping: the removal
of newlines and more than one space character in a row.
Reflowing text necessarily creates long lines of text... that will
then be wrapped.
I definitely want to find a way to make the distinction in
text/gemini documents. At present, wrapping is the default
that is happening for the vast majority of clients. As such, I
remain of the position that wrapped content should remain the
default and we should add a syntax of some form or other to
declare reflowed text. I am of the opinion that this syntax should
include exclusively visible characters (even if a field separator or
some other mostly unused ascii char would be convenient in
some respects).
Lists tend to get brought up in this conversation a good bit. The
way I see it, lists work fine in the current, wrapped, geminispace.
Yes, a line may wrap, but it is clear that it is still part of the above
line since a new list indicator has not been seen (1, -, <bullet>, etc).
Wrapping does make Python a pain to look at... but a user can always
save the document and open it in any editor they like. I would be
surprised to see python code in a text/gemini file anyway as that
filetype certainly can, but is not meant to provide code and will be
predominantly used for other things. Users can always link to code
files that will get rendered in whatever reader they have configured
for such a purpose.
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