Text reflow woes (or: I want bullets back!)y

[Sean Conner]

It was thus said that the Great solderpunk once stated:
> On Thu, Jan 16, 2020 at 09:40:50AM -0800, Aaron Janse wrote:
> 
> > In my experience, though, hard-wrapping text doesn't work well with git
> > anyway. And I don't know of any text editors that re-hard-wrap automatically
> > when the beginning of a paragraph is edited.
> 
> Hmm.  Neither do I and, in fact, well...I just do it manually.  Which I
> feel very sheepish admitting because that's kind of ridiculous.  But
> everybody writing for Gopherspace (which is many people here) must face
> precisely this problem, because hard-wrapping is basically compulsory
> there.  What are other people doing, writing in "long line" form and
> then feeding the result to `fmt` or `par` before uploading?

  Setting aside my phlog [1], the rest of the content on my gopher and
Gemini servers is written with 80 columns in mind.  The editor I use will
wrap at a default setting of 77 (but can be changed on the fly).  The last
computer I used with a width of less than 80 characters was my TRS-80 Color
Computer which had a width of 32 characters (and I last used regularly in
1987).  Since then, all the computers I've had supported at least 80
characters [2].

  For my phlog, it's a rendering of my web-based blog [3] where I use Lynx
to do the conversion from HTML to plain text (with a bit of post-processing
to fix intra-blog links).

  How do I write my blog entries?  I use my regular editor and I've adopted
a style a few years ago where I write ... not exactly a sentance per line,
but a thought per line.  Okay, an example from a previous post [4]:

[=== example ===]
<p>Okay,
to be fair,
I did find references and draft material covering the problem of pirates,
but I found his stance on a 12 gauge shotgun to be “more accurate” than a hand gun to be questionable at best.
“Accuracy” on a rolling, pitching boat in the open water is going to be questionable,
regardless of choice of firearm.</p>

<p>There is correspondence with yatch manufactuers,
blue prints,
price breakdowns
(nearly $300,000 in 1982 dollars,
making it nearly $800,000 in today's dollars—ouch!)
and scores of articles on everything related to sailing.
It also appears that Dad was trying to invent a new type of sail,
as there were drawings he did and correspondence with an engineering firm.
I'm not sure what I'll do with it all,
but the blueprints are cool.</p>
[=== end ===]

  Web browsers don't care about the raw formatting---they reflow it, with
styling coming from HTML and CSS.  And the reason I keep it very ragged like
that is to make it easier to move sentances and fragments about when editing
the entry.  I also run the entry through a processing script to convert some
shortcuts, like turning `` into “ or "1^st" into "1<sup>ST</sup>" [4] or
even pulling out image sizes for the <IMG> tag.

  This is probably more than you wanted to know 8-)

  -spc

[1]	gopher://gopher.conman.org/1phlog.gopher

[2]	Okay, yes!  I have an iPhone.  I don't use it to browse gopherspace
	though.

[3]	http://boston.conman.org/

[4]	Yes, I have a type of markup I use, but it's totally custom to me
	and how I write entries, but it does quite a bit.  Here's a sample
	that includes all the features (I think I keep this up to date):

		https://github.com/spc476/mod_blog/blob/master/NOTES/testmsg

	And the script I use:

		https://github.com/spc476/mod_blog/blob/master/Lua/format.lua