On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 5:34 PM, Michael Norrish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Emacs' M-q command will wrap paragraphs that appear in ASCII bulleted > and numbered lists. E.g., this sort of thing > > * this is a long paragraph full of words that I am composing in real > time, and which breaks over at least two lines once I get to the > end of this sentence. > > and also > > 1) this is another long paragraph and may I just add that composing > random bits of prose is a pretty tedious business when I could > probably just roll my face across the keyboard. > > and even > > this is a paragraph with any leading text to indicate that it is > part of a list but Emacs still does the right thing, because let's > face it, Emacs is just the bees' knees when it comes to editting. > (Let the religious wars begin.) > > I.e., if you insert your word into any of the above paragraphs and > then hit M-q they will fill in the way you'd want them to. > > I used this feature a great deal when I was Rulekeepor. Particularly > as proposal authors often failed to indent their proposal texts the > requisite number of spaces.
I'll second using emacs for proposal and rule formatting. Note that the above only works as desired (I believe) in the "text" major mode, which should be the default when editing .txt files and can otherwise be accessed with "M-x text-mode". It's also useful to set the fill column at the traditional 70 with "C-u 70 C-x f". There's also an auto-fill minor mode (M-x auto-fill-mode), but it doesn't work particularly well when modifying text in the middle of a paragraph (it only auto-fills when the *cursor* reaches the fill column). You can still just use M-q when that happens, though. -root
