Aidan> Ar an triú lá déag de mí na Nollaig, scríobh Uwe Brauer: Aidan> ?\n Aidan> No, that’s \012 (LINE FEED) under Unix, and emacs, in general. Uh, ok Aid >> 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. 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

Uwe> I thought newlines are hard in the sense of a word processor. Stephen> They are. But only in an Emacs buffer. Other text Stephen> processing programs, including browsers, wordprocessors, Stephen> wikis, and TeX will treat them differently from Emacs, and Stephen> differently from each other. Well then the filling function behaves a little contra intuitive: Consider this: Some test with a line of 35 columnENTER continues like this till hereENTER When I turn longlines-mode on (and set a corresponding variable) then a end of line symbol will be inserted to every line "¶" ! Some test with a line of 35 columnENTER¶ continues like this till hereENTER¶ When I run fill paragraph on the above paragraph I would get Some test with a line of 35 column continues like this till here¶ But now when I turn on longlines mode the line ending with `till' does not get that symbol "¶" ! That is the filling function did no enter a newline? Has this something to do with the variables sentence-end-double-space or paragraph-start? And finally given all that isn't the name use-hard-newlines a little misleading? Wouldn't it be better to use the phrase use-newlines-with-layout or something? Uwe Brauer

Uwe Brauer <oub(a)mat.ucm.es&gt; writes: That symbol is actually called paragraph sign, right? -- Adrian Aichner mailto:adrian＠xemacs.org http://www.xemacs.org/