On Tuesday, August 14 at 08:57 PM, quoth Andrew Myers:
Actually, I think I would make the strong claim that what I am talking about is not just some personal preference, but a fairly universal one. All serious text formatting systems try to make line lengths equal (without introducing additional line breaks), because this is known to aid readability. The TeX formatting algorithm is one widely used approach. I can't see what generally held notion of goodness the current formatting optimizes for except algorithmic simplicity. But perhaps someone can explain why they prefer linebreaks to be inserted greedily?
Well, for one thing, gq isn’t always used exclusively for reformatting blocks of text. I use it occasionally to reformat C++ code that was destroyed by emacs or email or something. In such cases, I don’t want lines to be all equal lengths; I want them to look like code (note that GNU indent only works on C).
~Kyle --The average Ph.D thesis is nothing but the transference of bones from one graveyard to another.
-- J. Frank Dobie, "A Texan in England"
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