From: ishamid Date: 2006-12-10T09:41:47+09:00 Subject: Re: text wrap Hi Paul, On Dec 9, 4:31 pm, Paul Lutus wrote: > ishamid wrote: > > Hi, > > > I have a ruby script that's doing what I need, and I would like to add > > one feature. The script outputs a text file, and I would like Ruby to > > take the final text file and wrap it at 67 characters, instead of doing > > it manually in the editor. > > > Is there an available method or something that I can invoke? If so, can > > you give me an example of its use (I'm still very much a novice!) > Idris, I can offer various methods to break text up into individual lines, > but I want to ask you to think this over before doing it. Ok, see below... > If you take a text document containing paragraphs (each a continuous string > with no embedded linefeeds) and break the paragraphs into lines of specific > lengths, you are throwing away information that is very difficult -- almost > impossible in some cases -- to recover. > Most environments can produce nicely formatted paragraphs for you, while you > are editing the text and while printing it. It is generally preferred that > the paragraph-to-line conversion take place at the time of display or > printing, not before, and that the text be retained in its original form. Perhaps my case is different. I am converting OOo xml to TeX for further processing. Since TeX input is one-dimensional, TeX-the-engine does not, akaik, care if the input is wrapped or not. I generally edit my TeX-documents wrapped and editing a mile-long paragraph is a pain. If I run the script and wrap from the editor then, when I run the script again, I have to wrap from the editor again. Does this case seem like an exception to your point or no? > > I am not unaware of the irony of posting this advice in a medium (Usenet) > that breaks paragraphs into lines right away, before transmitting the > message, and this trait is shared by the standard e-mail protocol. Both > these behaviors (e.g. Usenet and e-mail breaking up paragraphs) are now > widely recognized as mistakes, unfortunately they cannot really be > corrected at this late date. But newer protocols, and all decent word > processing document formats, do not do this to their content, for excellent > reasons. > > Consider this. Let's say you break a document up into 67-character lines, > permanently, and save it in that form. Later on, you discover you need to > print the document with 80-character lines. You are out of luck -- the > damage has been done. But TeX does not care about line lengths in an editor; it just processes a single paragraph as it's told, ignoring wrapping completely. I notice that David Kastrup posts here; he is an expert on TeX text-editing and can correct me if I'm wrong. > There are various schemes to rejoin broken lines into paragraphs once again, > but all of them have corner cases where they fail. It is generally agreed > to be better not to have broken the paragraphs in the first place. > > If, after reading this, you still want to break paragraphs into lines, post > again, and someone will offer suggestions about how to proceed. Do my reasons make more since now, or should I consider something else? Thank you so much for the care you put into answering my question; it is appreciated! Best Idris