[pmwiki-users] Word wrap problem

[Jonathan Scott Duff]

On Tue, Apr 19, 2005 at 06:12:57AM +0200, Joachim Durchholz wrote:
> Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> >I just came up with another option -- we can give the wiki administrator
> >an option to break preformatted text lines that are longer than
> >some number of characters (as set by the wiki administrator).
> >Would this work?  The lines beginning with spaces would still be
> >preformatted, but wouldn't be so long as to extend off the right
> >side of the page.
> >
> >Comments?
> 
> There's no good column to break at. People with a wide screen will be 
> unhappy if the admin sets it to anything less than 40, people with a 
> narrow screen will be unhappy if the admin sets it to anything above 30.

Aye, but that's the wikiadmin's problem.  Pm is just suggesting that
we give the wikiadmin as easy way to break long lines as appropriate
for his application.   Whether that's what they *really* want is up to
them to decide.   If they want something more complicated, they are
free to code up a recipe  :-)

> More philosphically, pre-formatted text is, well, preformatted. 

Indeed. Mucking with preformatted text is just asking for trouble IMHO.
Follow the KISS principle. Having an option to break long lines is about
as far as I think we can push KISS before it becomes no longer simple.

I don't know exactly what problem precipitated this thread as I missed
the beginning, but it seems to me that this is where editing tools would
come in rather than rendering options. For instance, if I'm using vi to
edit a wiki page, I can use fmt(1) or a handy perl program that uses
Text::Autoformat to rearrange my text such that it fits comfortably
within parameters I specify. Then, *that's* what gets preformatted.
Similar tools can be used in other editing environments (I'm sure
someone can code up a recipe to do something similar in the standard
edit box used by browsers)

-Scott
-- 
Jonathan Scott Duff
duff at pobox.com