Re: hard and soft newlines
>>>> "Aidan" == Aidan Kehoe
<kehoea(a)parhasard.net> writes:
Aidan> Ar an triú lá déag de mí na Nollaig, scríobh Uwe Brauer:
> >> What character is inserted, when `soft newlines' are
used for
> >> filling paragraphs
>
Aidan> ?\n
>
> But that is CR LF in linux?
Aidan> No, that’s \012 (LINE FEED) under Unix, and emacs, in general.
Uh, ok
Aid >>
>
> What I am not sure about is whether this is really needed
> or whether it would be fine to use `soft newlines' and
> filling for long paragraphs.
Aidan> That should be fine if Wikipedia is like TeX in this.
Aidan> Note that differentiating “hard” and “soft” newlines
Aidan> only makes sense if `use-hard-newlines' is t. If it
Aidan> isn’t, all newlines are hard to XEmacs, though, of
Aidan> course, not to Wikipedia.
> I try to discuss this with the guys from wikipedia but I
> realize that I don't really understand what the difference
> between a soft and hard newline is.
Aidan> There isn’t one in pure text encoding. It’s a layout concept.
Ok let me try to explain a little my confusion (which is partially
caused by the strange behaviour of longlines.el)
1. When I use a uh word processor (politically correct) OO,
then hitting return inserts a *real new line* which will be
printed.
2. When I hit return a newline is inserted and when I use a
text processor like TeX, this newline is ignored. Only an
empty line is interpreted as a newline
Now I thought: when I use use-hard-newlines
Hitting return would enter a new line in the sense of 1. But that
seems to be not correct.
What made me think this is true?
- Take a file in fundamental mode (use-hard-newlines is nil)
and enter a long paragraph, if say set-column is set to 70
(the default) and hit fill-paragraph, the paragraph is filled
and new soft lines are inserted. The following trivial
function unfills the paragraph:
(defun unfill-paragraph ()
(interactive)
(let ((fill-column (point-max)))
(fill-paragraph nil) ))
Now when you turn on longlines-mode (use-hard-newlines is
t) and when you turn it off it stays t (which is odd). In
any case,
with (use-hard-newlines t) I cannot unfill the paragraph
any more, I have to set the variable to nil again, then the
unfilling works. So this the unfilling did not work I
thought newlines are hard in the sense of a word
processor.
There are other strange things in this mode I
have to check before running into some conclusions, so I am
not entirely sure that this behaviour is true in general,
that is (use-hard-newlines t) I cannot unfill a paragraph.
Anyhow thanks for the clarification.
Uwe