Re[2]: [hypermail] Suggested TODO: <pre> line wrapping

Tom von Alten said on Tuesday, January 16, 2001 at 1:10:06 PM:

> On Fri, 12 Jan 2001, Crispen, Bob wrote:

>> I suggest we add a 'word wrap column' for pages that generated with
>> 'showhtml = Off'. As soon as a word crosses the specified column, we
>> enter a newline tag before that word.

Er, actually I didn't, but I concur.

> Are you sure we want to do this? I don't like horizontal scrolling
> either, but there is often good reason for having long lines - such
> as quoting long URLs. Arbitrarily wrapping things to a given line
> length is not necessarily an enhancement.

> Dealing properly with MIME-encoded "soft" returns in text would
> probably be a good thing, but simply deciding that lines should be
> XX characters or shorter probably would not.

If we let the admin decide, this could be a good thing in <pre> mode.

One thing to watch out for is <pre> sections inside HTML text, which I don't think should be wrapped. I suggest the logic be:

      if SHOWHTML is false and PRE_LINE_LENGTH is non-zero
          scan for the first whitespace character in the line
          if the first whitespace character isn't a newline
              if the first whitespace char position >= PRE_LINE_LENGTH-1
                  replace the whitespace character with a newline

If we default PRE_LINE_LENGTH to 0, it'll continue to work the way it does now unless the site admin chooses to enable long line word wrap by setting it to some non-zero number.

-- 
Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen
crispen at hiwaay dot net

It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word.
- Andrew Jackson