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

Jason McBrayer jmcbray at carcosa.net

Tue Jan 21 15:17:46 GMT 2020

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solderpunk <solderpunk at SDF.ORG> writes:

> There is another option that I hadn't thought about until now, which
> is to do only the first half of 2. above.  That is, lines longer than
> the viewport get broken up nicely at word boundaries into lines of
> length equal to or less than the viewport width - but that's it.
> Consecutive shorter lines are *not* joined together.  Blank lines in
> the "source" are rendered, one by one, into empty vertical space.
> The renderer has no explicit concept of a paragraph.

If 'paragraphs' are always written as continuous long lines, this works.If they get written as hard-wrapped 80-column lines, then you get theexisting issue on narrow displays. So specifying this implementation ofwrapping is also a recommendation to authors to write paragraphs ascontinuous long lines, I guess.

It's not bad. It preserves quality 1 (ease of implementation) and 2(some richness allowed by literal text formatting), and *may* get you 3most of the time, as long as authors comply with the recommendation.

I'd recommend, if you go with this, to not also include the ``` literalformatting. There's going to be a breakpoint of complexity somewherewhere text/gemini will not do the job you want it to, and you should beserving text/markdown or even text/html.

-- Jason McBrayer      | “Strange is the night where black stars rise,jmcbray at carcosa.net | and strange moons circle through the skies,                    | but stranger still is lost Carcosa.”                    | ― Robert W. Chambers,The King in Yellow