On 01/16/12 17:36, Eric Weir wrote:
Still not quite clear about the concept of "flowing" and
"reflowed" text. The way Tim put it makes it sound like all
paragraphs, not just each paragraph, on one line.

I'm not sure what I have. I have vim set to wrap lines at the
screen, but I don't think there's any wrapping in the file.
So does my text "flow" or not?

Reflowing (as I intended it to mean, which I apparently didn't convey well enough...sorry) is indeed what was going on in the thread Ben Fritz linked to. In this case, one might start with paragraphs like

  this is some text
  and this is some
  more text

  and a paragraph
  with some extra
  text in it

containing 7 newlines (one after each line of text, and two between the paragraphs) and one word might be inserted "reflowing" the first paragraph to

  this is some keen
  text and this is
  some more text

using "gq<motion>" to "reflow" the text according to your 'textwidth' (or 'wrapmargin' setting, something like a ludicrously small "textwidth=17" in this example). A traditional diff (such as "diff" or Vim's diffing) would tell you that *all three* lines of that first paragraph changed. OOTH, the prose-author likely only wants to know that the word "keen" was inserted (ignoring the reflowing changes).

If your paragraphs are all one line (as I think I understand you describing your text) separated by one or two newlines, traditional diffs should work pretty well. They'd at a minimum show you which paragraphs changed between the two documents. With vimdiff, it also highlights interline changes, though it might require scrolling horizontally to see the individual changes. Thus you'd have

  this is some text and this is some more text

  and a paragraph with some extra text in it

and the 'wrap' option would *display* them broken but they wouldn't contain any newlines within the paragraphs themselves. When you inserted "keen", the first paragraph would become

  this is some keen text and this is some more text

and vimdiffing them would highlight the line as changed (colored with "hi DiffChange" color), and highlight the word "keen" (colored with "hi DiffText" color).

If you have two line-breaks to mark paragraphs and your paragraphs *do* contain line-breaks (what I understand you are NOT doing), the "wdiff" tool mentioned in the other thread helps to sensibly highlight those changes when text is reflowed where traditional diff/vimdiff produces noisy results.

Hope my prolix proclivities elucidated matters :)

-tim





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