Wordprocessor behaviour

Wordprocessor behaviour

[Daniel Andersen]

Hi all!

I'm quite new to emacs and I have a question which has bothered me a 
long time. I'm writing a book and started using emacs insteed of Word, 
which I got pretty much tired of, but there is one thing which annoyes 
me; when I have written a long sentense and it is wrapped to many lines 
on the screen, then when I want to go on "screen-line" up in the same 
sentence, it jumps to the previous paragraph insteed, which means that I 
have to move the cursor along the line insteed to get upwards.

I have searched for information on this but couldn't find any myself; I 
know that one can have emacs break long lines itself, but I don't want 
it to do so...

Hope anyone can help me!

Daniel Andersen

Re: Wordprocessor behaviour

[Andrew Rutherford]

Daniel Andersen <dani_ande@yahoo.dk> writes:

> Hi all!
> 
> I'm quite new to emacs and I have a question which has bothered me a
> long time. I'm writing a book and started using emacs insteed of Word,
> which I got pretty much tired of, but there is one thing which annoyes
> me; when I have written a long sentense and it is wrapped to many
> lines on the screen, then when I want to go on "screen-line" up in the
> same sentence, it jumps to the previous paragraph insteed, which means
> that I have to move the cursor along the line insteed to get upwards.
> 
> I have searched for information on this but couldn't find any myself;
> I know that one can have emacs break long lines itself, but I don't
> want it to do so...

Why not? The tools you would use beside emacs to write a book treat
line-breaks as white space. There's no reason for long lines: they
don't fit on a terminal and they're hard to edit. If you have a need
for them in the end, there are probably modes doing what sed or tr do.

-- 
Andrew Rutherford
ajrutherford@mail.ru

Re: Wordprocessor behaviour

[Kai Großjohann]

Daniel Andersen <dani_ande@yahoo.dk> writes:

> I'm quite new to emacs and I have a question which has bothered me a
> long time. I'm writing a book and started using emacs insteed of Word,
> which I got pretty much tired of, but there is one thing which annoyes
> me; when I have written a long sentense and it is wrapped to many
> lines on the screen, then when I want to go on "screen-line" up in the
> same sentence, it jumps to the previous paragraph insteed, which means
> that I have to move the cursor along the line insteed to get upwards.

Emacs uses the traditional Unix text file layout.  This means that
there is a "hard newline" after each line, and paragraphs are
separated by empty lines.  You can use M-q to refill a paragraph if
there are too-long or too-short lines in it.  M-x auto-fill-mode RET
allows you to produce short lines when typing normally.

It would be very difficult to make Emacs work differently internally,
but there is a tool, longlines.el, which inserts newlines when
reading from disk and removes them again when writing to disk.  That
way, the files have the one-line-one-paragraph style whereas the
Emacs buffers use the many-lines-per-paragraph style that Emacs
expects.

Warning: I wrote longlines.el initially.
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Re: Wordprocessor behaviour

[Kevin Rodgers]

Daniel Andersen wrote:

> I'm quite new to emacs and I have a question which has bothered me a 
> long time. I'm writing a book and started using emacs insteed of Word, 
> which I got pretty much tired of, but there is one thing which annoyes 
> me; when I have written a long sentense and it is wrapped to many lines 
> on the screen, then when I want to go on "screen-line" up in the same 
> sentence, it jumps to the previous paragraph insteed, which means that I 
> have to move the cursor along the line insteed to get upwards.
> 
> I have searched for information on this but couldn't find any myself; I 
> know that one can have emacs break long lines itself, but I don't want 
> it to do so...

Check out the Emacs Lisp List: http://anc.ed.ac.uk/~stephen/emacs/ell.html

I found screen-lines.el there, which you could try:
http://homepage1.nifty.com/bmonkey/emacs/elisp/screen-lines.el

-- 
<a href="mailto:&lt;kevin.rodgers&#64;ihs.com&gt;">Kevin Rodgers</a>

Re: Wordprocessor behaviour

[Daniel Andersen]

Thanks! This was just what I wanted! :)

Daniel

Re: Wordprocessor behaviour

[Roodwriter]

Daniel Andersen wrote:

> Hi all!
> 
> I'm quite new to emacs and I have a question which has bothered me a
> long time. I'm writing a book and started using emacs insteed of Word,
> which I got pretty much tired of, but there is one thing which annoyes
> me; when I have written a long sentense and it is wrapped to many lines
> on the screen, then when I want to go on "screen-line" up in the same
> sentence, it jumps to the previous paragraph insteed, which means that I
> have to move the cursor along the line insteed to get upwards.
> 
> I have searched for information on this but couldn't find any myself; I
> know that one can have emacs break long lines itself, but I don't want
> it to do so...
> 
> Hope anyone can help me!
> 
> Daniel Andersen


There's also refill mode, which wasn't in the documentation that came with 
my version. It'll auto-fill and then go back and refill automatically 
without having to do the M-q thing.

It does have some drawbacks. One is that it appears to work best with the 
paragraph formatting you see here--no indentation and separated by a blank 
space. If you're using LaTeX to produce documents that's not a problem, 
since that's the format it uses. However, refill conflicts with LaTeX.

Like M-q it leaves newlines (a lot of people call them carriage returns) at 
the end of each line.

Refill also is greedy. If you type this:

A few
words
on
every line.

It'll put them together into "A few words on every line." I toggle it for 
this reason. I bound it to a function key.

If you do tab in regular text mode EVERY line after that will be tabbed. 
Frankly I find it easier to type things out in block form like this and use 
a macro to convert the paragraphs. It's easier because I don't accidentally 
hit the Caps Lock key and start eVERY PARAGRAPH LIKE THIS.

There is a paragraph-indent-minor-mode which allows you to use refill AND 
tabs. The problem I've found, at least on my machine, is that for some 
reason the size of the tabs varies. No it doesn't make sense to me either.

So I write text files like this, using a macro to convert it to tabbed 
paragraphs with long lines when I'm done and just grump a lot.

For what it's worth, I'm a news writer who works at home using Emacs on a 
Linux box. I send my work out as straight text files by e-mail. When I have 
something destined for paper (beyond throwaway notes) I use LaTeX.

I just figure it's the price I pay for all the rest of the advanced 
features. But it sure would be nice if someone could make a proper word 
wrap.

Hope this helps

--Rod

-- 
Author of "Linux for Non-Geeks--Clear-eyed Answers for Practical Consumers" 
and "Boring Stories from Uncle Rod." Both are available at 
http://www.rodwriterpublishing.com/index.html

To reply by e-mail, take the extra "o" out of my e-mail address. It's to 
confuse spambots, of course.

Re: Wordprocessor behaviour

[Kai Großjohann]

"Roodwriter@core.com" <Roodwriter@core.com> writes:

> If you do tab in regular text mode EVERY line after that will be tabbed. 
> Frankly I find it easier to type things out in block form like this and use 
> a macro to convert the paragraphs. It's easier because I don't accidentally 
> hit the Caps Lock key and start eVERY PARAGRAPH LIKE THIS.

    There is a mode, paragraph-indent-text-mode, that provides the
paragraph format you see here.
    A line starting with whitespace starts a new paragraph in this
mode.  It used to be called just text-mode.

Also, if you remove the whitespace from the second line manually,
then you will get the behavior you want.

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Re: Wordprocessor behaviour

[Roodwriter]

Kai Großjohann wrote:

> "Roodwriter@core.com" <Roodwriter@core.com> writes:
> 
>> If you do tab in regular text mode EVERY line after that will be tabbed.
>> Frankly I find it easier to type things out in block form like this and
>> use a macro to convert the paragraphs. It's easier because I don't
>> accidentally hit the Caps Lock key and start eVERY PARAGRAPH LIKE THIS.
> 
>     There is a mode, paragraph-indent-text-mode, that provides the
> paragraph format you see here.
>     A line starting with whitespace starts a new paragraph in this
> mode.  It used to be called just text-mode.
> 
> Also, if you remove the whitespace from the second line manually,
> then you will get the behavior you want.
> 

I am mystified. I must have tried this a year ago with my last upgrade since 
I discovered I bound that command to a function key when I tried your 
suggestion. But I must have had some problem--one I can't recall--since I 
stopped using it.

But it seems to work just fine now. I don't know why.

That being said it appears using refill mode and paragraph-indent-text-mode 
together may be a winner for writing text documents--except for the 
drawback that you'll still get short lines, which not everyone will 
consider a drawback. (You can macro that problem away, though, or use 
longlines.)

Personally, I'll stick with the block paragraph method because of the LaTeX 
issue, the fact that that's the style I use when I'm taking notes (it's 
faster), the caps lock problem and, simply, it's now a habit with me.

But this may be the solution for many other people.

--Rod

-- 
Author of "Linux for Non-Geeks--Clear-eyed Answers for Practical Consumers" 
and "Boring Stories from Uncle Rod." Both are available at 
http://www.rodwriterpublishing.com/index.html

To reply by e-mail, take the extra "o" out of my e-mail address. It's to 
confuse spambots, of course.

Re: Wordprocessor behaviour

[Kai Großjohann]

"Roodwriter@core.com" <Roodwriter@core.com> writes:

> That being said it appears using refill mode and paragraph-indent-text-mode 
> together may be a winner for writing text documents--except for the 
> drawback that you'll still get short lines, which not everyone will 
> consider a drawback. (You can macro that problem away, though, or use 
> longlines.)

Maybe longlines.el could be used to ameliorate that.  If it works,
that is.
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