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From: tale@pawl.rpi.edu (David C Lawrence)
Newsgroups: comp.emacs
Subject: indentation in GNU (was: Two EMACS Questions)
Message-ID: <7131@rpi.edu>
Date: 7 Sep 89 19:15:15 GMT
References: <574@ajpo.sei.cmu.edu> <37636@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
	<1989Sep7.175620.16036@talos.uucp>
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Reply-To: tale@pawl.rpi.edu
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Edward Berard writes:
Edward>    1. Is there a way in emacs to create "hanging indents" like
Edward>       this one? What I would like is to be able to create a
Edward>       paragraph formatted like this one, and not have to shift
Edward>       each line, re-format, etc. myself.

In <1989Sep7.175620.16036@talos.uucp> kjones@talos.uucp (Kyle Jones) writes:
Kyle> Quite a while ago I wrote a package called "filladapt" that handles this
Kyle> correctly, and takes care of several other special cases where normal
Kyle> filling/word wrap fails.  I'll post it to the emacs groups
Kyle> today.

When I first read the request I expected Martin Neitzel (neitzel@pollux.UUCP)
to ship off a copy of gin-mode.el to Edward.  Perhaps he has; but now
that this one posting has seen about four follow-ups in the thread
perhaps it is also a good time to point out this package to the rest
of the net.  Here is Martin's summary of gin-mode:

;; Gnu Emacs supports filling of paragraphs and wrapping of lines with a
;; settable string to be used for the left margin, the variable
;; ``fill-prefix''.  Setting this variable by hand is fine, but can
;; become mildly annoying if it has to be changed often in a document.
;; However, the appropriate value for fill-prefix can be derived from
;; the layout of the current line in almost all cases.
;;
;; This package provides a function and a minor mode that ``guesses''
;; the indentation to be used for (auto-) filling.  It has proven to be
;; very handy in all text-mode variants.  It uses a simple but effective
;; heuristic to guess a fill-prefix based on the current line and two
;; (configurable) regular expressions.  Within gin-mode, I almost never
;; have to use "C-x." explicitly anymore.
;;
;; The two regexps control
;; 
;; 	* what line beginnings have to be taken as "fill-prefix" (my
;; 	  standard setup recognizes initial white space and typical
;; 	  mail-prefixes like ">" or "name> ").
;; 
;; 	* what line beginnings are really hanging indents.  The
;; 	  standard setup recognizes the stars used right here,
;; 	  enumerations, and some more...

I set gin-mode on by default in my text-mode-hook and find it very
useful.  I almost never have to muck with fill-prefix manually
anymore.  gin-mode is available in the elisp-archive on
tut.cis.ohio-state.edu under (I think) pub/gnu/emacs.

Dave
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