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From: gast@lanai.cs.ucla.edu (David Gast)
Newsgroups: comp.editors
Subject: Re: why do editors "shrink-wrap" the text?
Message-ID: <22669@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU>
Date: 7 Apr 89 03:38:49 GMT
References: <1686@wpi.wpi.edu> <97499@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> <1706@wpi.wpi.edu>
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Reply-To: gast@cs.ucla.edu (David Gast)
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In article <1706@wpi.wpi.edu> jhallen@wpi.wpi.edu (Joseph H Allen) writes:
>How does everyone like the idea of formatting paragraphs in this manner:
>
>  When you type in a paragraph, lines which continue get a SPACE character
>appended to them.  The last line of a paragraph and non-paragaph lines may not
>contain spaces after them (I.E. this indicates "hard CRs").  This way, a
>"global reformat paragraph" command can work and WYSIWYG-like editing which
>automatically reformats paragraphs can be done on normal text files.

This is not a good idea for general use.  It assumes that you are using
a word processing package like WORD* (that is a Kleene Star).  I do not
want to use a WYSIWYG text formatting program.

>  Also, what is everyone's preferred methode for storing format information in
>normal text files? 

LaTeX commands

>  The idea is to make a word processor suitable for most college-level paper
>and "news" message writting which keeps the file formatted as "normal" ascii
>text.

If I want to reformat a paragraph while preparing an item to post to news, 
I use the command fmt.

Anyway, news and mail both have limits on line length (RFC821 specifies
1000 characters) but I am not sure what limits are typically in place.
Therefore, your idea will result in long lines/paragraphs being truncated.
Further, I do not want to have to have every word processor built in so I
can read news in whatever format you decide to send it.

David Gast
gast@cs.ucla.edu
{uunet,ucbvax,rutgers}!{ucla-cs,cs.ucla.edu}!gast