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

[Jason McBrayer]

solderpunk <solderpunk at SDF.ORG> writes:

> There is another option that I hadn't thought about until now, which
> is to do only the first half of 2. above.  That is, lines longer than
> the viewport get broken up nicely at word boundaries into lines of
> length equal to or less than the viewport width - but that's it.
> Consecutive shorter lines are *not* joined together.  Blank lines in
> the "source" are rendered, one by one, into empty vertical space.
> The renderer has no explicit concept of a paragraph.

If 'paragraphs' are always written as continuous long lines, this works.
If they get written as hard-wrapped 80-column lines, then you get the
existing issue on narrow displays. So specifying this implementation of
wrapping is also a recommendation to authors to write paragraphs as
continuous long lines, I guess.

It's not bad. It preserves quality 1 (ease of implementation) and 2
(some richness allowed by literal text formatting), and *may* get you 3
most of the time, as long as authors comply with the recommendation.

I'd recommend, if you go with this, to not also include the ``` literal
formatting. There's going to be a breakpoint of complexity somewhere
where text/gemini will not do the job you want it to, and you should be
serving text/markdown or even text/html.

-- 
Jason McBrayer      | “Strange is the night where black stars rise,
jmcbray at carcosa.net | and strange moons circle through the skies,
                    | but stranger still is lost Carcosa.”
                    | ― Robert W. Chambers,The King in Yellow