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

Aaron Janse aaron at ajanse.me

Thu Jan 16 20:50:45 GMT 2020

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On Thu, Jan 16, 2020, at 12:26 PM, solderpunk wrote:
> But everybody writing for Gopherspace (which is many people here) must
> face precisely this problem, because hard-wrapping is basically compulsory
> there.

And my understanding is that while Gemini isn't supposed to be a Gopher 2.0,it's supposed to make it better than Gopher. I think that non-hard-wrappingcould be a big step towards this goal.

lel said:
> Adding an arbitrary cap to line lengths purely so that a hypothetical
> mobile client doesn't require 10-20 lines of wrapping code (code that
> Google suggests already exists in the Android SDK and merely has to be
> invoked) seems absurd to me, particularly when the wrapping itself is
> trivial, and this is entirely because word-wrapping is considered
> preferable to naive, occasionally-mid-word wrapping.

Honestly, even if it takes 40 lines of code, I'd rather write that thenmanually wrap every single gemini document I ever write. 

> What are other people doing, writing in "long line" form and
> then feeding the result to `fmt` or `par` before uploading?

For things such as email, after manually wrapping quotes, I think using`fmt` or `par` is the most efficient way to wrap text. However, this onlyworks for text that's written once, such as emails. This doesn't work forcontinually edited content such as websites.

> If you're hosting shared gemini content for a group of non-technical users,
> it might make sense for your server to automatically reformat gemini files
> before sending them

I don't have a problem with people "rendering" into Gemini. I just think thatthe spec shouldn't make it necessary. Rendering/compiling into Gemini addsa level of indirection that hides the transparency that makes me love theprotocol.

Cheers!