Re: Enriched Fill, and soft newlines

[Kai Grossjohann <kai@emptydomain.de>]

KKramsch <karlUNDERSCOREkramsch@yahooPERIODcom.invalid> writes:

> I would like to have Emacs automatically insert "soft newlines" to
> wrap around the lines in a paragraph, and I would appreciate it
> very much if someone could explain to me how to do this.

There is longlines.el which can add soft newlines when the file is
read, and remove them again when the file is written.  Then end result
is that you see normal word-wrapped lines in Emacs, but the file on
disk uses the Windows-like "each paragraph a single very long line"
style.

> My understanding from the documentation was that all I had to do
> was to load the Enriched and Fill modes, but when I do this the
> filling appears to be done by inserting *hard* newlines, since when
> I change the width of a window displaying a buffer in the Enriched
> Fill mode, the positions of the breaks within the lines do not
> change to reflect the new width.

What you are looking for is not called soft newlines in the Emacs
world, it is called display word wrap.  The Emacs C code needs to be
changed to achieve this.  Perhaps there are experimental
implementations in some people's working copies, but afaik none of
them has been checked into the Emacs CVS repository.  Display word
wrap has been the subject of a number of heated discussions in the
Emacs devloper list.  I think the consensus is now that display word
wrap is a useful thing.

Kai