One sentence per line, please
rhodesmill.org
One sentence per line, please
1–10 of 36 posts
Re: One sentence per line, please
#2The source control thing makes sense to me (you'll get nicer diffs), but otherwise I don't understand the benefits listed here.
Re: One sentence per line, please
#3Or, you can use a diff command which understands word diffs. git has '--word-diff', svn unfortunatly doesn't have such an option, but 'http://www.sable.mcgill.ca/~cpicke/swd/ provides a nice script (there are others). Don't know about mercurial.
I hate working with authors who try to force line breaks into text unnaturally. I have heard many justifications for it over the years, but I find it hard to understand why anyone would do it, other than because their tools (soft word wrap in the editor, word-based diffing) are terrible.
Re: One sentence per line, please
#4I love the PWB! [line break]
Sometimes the best stuff does not have the best marketing.
Any chance the author can post a copy of the documentation his father had saved for the Documenter's Work Bench?
So many UNIX utilities are line-based, paragraphs just complicate things. [line break] Yet we still type in paragraphs.
You can take the above text and feed it through fmt (one of my favorite utilities) and you get an opening paragraph with two sentences, a single line paragraph, and a final paragraph with two sentences. You can control the line length too. Want 40-column output for better readability? Easy, when using fmt. But you need input that is single lines.
Have you ever ran PDF's through pdftotext or pdftohtml and been frustrated by the formatting? Line breaks from hell.
If documents were distributed in the format the author describes we could convert them into PDF's and other pretty printing formats. But converting from these "paragraphed" formats into readable plain text can be a real nuisance.
Re: One sentence per line, please
#5Or, you can use a diff command which understands word diffs. git has '--word-diff', svn unfortunatly doesn't have such an option, but ' http://www.sable.mcgill.ca/~cpicke/swd/ provides a nice script (there are others). Don't know about mercurial. I hate working with authors who try to force line breaks into text unnaturally. I have heard many justifications for it over the years, but I find it hard to understand why…
The original article did say "In the tutorial, I ask students whether or not the Sphinx text files in their project will be read by end-users."
I certainly would not send a file with 'semantic linefeeds' to anyone else. I use markdown quite a lot and LaTeX a little, so I'm happy with
source file -> formatter -> file for reading
I'm sure someone will come up with a regexp that can take a 'standard' text file and split the lines on full stops and commas to restore an edited readable text file to 'semantic linefeed' source, thus allowing round trip copy editing.
Re: One sentence per line, please
#6Or, you can use a diff command which understands word diffs. git has '--word-diff', svn unfortunatly doesn't have such an option, but ' http://www.sable.mcgill.ca/~cpicke/swd/ provides a nice script (there are others). Don't know about mercurial. I hate working with authors who try to force line breaks into text unnaturally. I have heard many justifications for it over the years, but I find it hard to understand why…
If the merging isn't also word-aware, then surely this is only half a solution. I don't think the svn script you linked is able to merge (I only read the Readme, no further investigation).
Re: One sentence per line, please
#7This is a topic that has often bothered me when collaborating with people on writing latex.
I use Emacs with auto-fill-mode and Meta-Q to fill paragraphs. This usually works out ok in my own files because usually a re-fill of existing text only affects a few lines.
When other people get involved, diffs and merges are ruined, as the article says.
But the article's solution sounds like a lot of work. Do I have to manually break lines that get longer than 80 characters (or whatever my limit is)? Am I supposed to turn soft word wrap on?
I think the right solution is to rebind Meta-Q in Emacs to some magic command that refuses to reflow any text which is reported as unmodified by the version control, but does reflow new/modified text according to the article's rules, and also imposes an 80-character limit.
Edit [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/539984/how-do-i-get-emacs...] has a lot of solutions for getting Emacs to fill according to the article's suggestions.
Re: One sentence per line, please
#8This is a topic that has often bothered me when collaborating with people on writing latex. I use Emacs with auto-fill-mode and Meta-Q to fill paragraphs. This usually works out ok in my own files because usually a re-fill of existing text only affects a few lines. When other people get involved, diffs and merges are ruined, as the article says. But the article's solution sounds like a lot of work. Do I have to manua…
> Do I have to manually break lines that get longer than 80 characters (or whatever my limit is)? Am I supposed to turn soft word wrap on?
In most situations, there should be some sort of semantic break in your sentences every 80 characters or less. (It may not be demarcated with a comma.) If there isn't, you may want to consider reworking those sentences for clarity.
Re: One sentence per line, please
#9This is a topic that has often bothered me when collaborating with people on writing latex. I use Emacs with auto-fill-mode and Meta-Q to fill paragraphs. This usually works out ok in my own files because usually a re-fill of existing text only affects a few lines. When other people get involved, diffs and merges are ruined, as the article says. But the article's solution sounds like a lot of work. Do I have to manua…
> Do I have to manually break lines that get longer than 80 characters (or whatever my limit is)? Am I supposed to turn soft word wrap on? In most situations, there should be some sort of semantic break in your sentences every 80 characters or less. (It may not be demarcated with a comma.) If there isn't, you may want to consider reworking those sentences for clarity.
Or you could just set your line wrap margin pretty low, e.g. 50 or 60 characters, and then when you edit don't re-wrap. Requires less thinking about where to break lines, while still keeping most changes localized to a line and thus cleaner diffs.
Re: One sentence per line, please
#10This is a topic that has often bothered me when collaborating with people on writing latex. I use Emacs with auto-fill-mode and Meta-Q to fill paragraphs. This usually works out ok in my own files because usually a re-fill of existing text only affects a few lines. When other people get involved, diffs and merges are ruined, as the article says. But the article's solution sounds like a lot of work. Do I have to manua…
I would just use soft word wrap - well, I always have soft wrap on, but especially in this case it seems simplest to me to let long sentences/clauses soft wrap and retain the mapping from line to semantic unit.