Re: the justifying of indented text

[Seb]

Hi Benno,


> > * if autoindent is OFF (which in my mind means "I'm writing text"):
> >
> >     Yes, an indented line can only ever be the start of a paragraph 
> >     because that's pretty much the definition of a paragraph in a text.
>
> Okay.  But what about bullet lists?

Bullet lists are GREAT. They work only when auto-indent is ON. So I switch 
it on when I write one.

I did write that "I *usually* don't use autoindent [...] if I'm writing a 
text". Two exceptions came to my mind but I thought I'd make my point more 
clearly if I omitted them at first. Bullet lists are one. The other one is 
long quotations, which I put in paragraphs that have a Tab offset at each 
line (and a second <Tab> on the first line of each paragraph). For these, 
too, I need auto-indent.

> > * If autoindent in ON:
> >
> >     Two lines sharing the same amount of space at the beginning of either
> >     line belong to the same paragraph.
>
> But...  If I understood well, autoindent being ON means you are writing
> code, and in the code itself there are no paragraphs.

If I'm writing code, I use --auto-indent to, well, auto-indent the code. I 
seldom use justification in this case, but there is one use case: if I 
don't switch off the hard wrapping of long lines, eventually I'll type one 
line that will reach the 80th column of my terminal and the text will 
spill to the next line; justification brings the two lines back together 
nicely after Esc-L and Alt-Enter to temporarily maximize the width of my 
terminal.

I also use auto-indent for bullet lists and long quotations. In bullet 
lists, I can't remember a time when I may have wanted to separate two 
paragraphs within one bullet point. In long quotations, it could be 
discussed but the fix is easy (blank line). Whereas in code such as
        \noindent
        Text
I cannot leave a blank line otherwise the \noindent has no effect.

> >     %    Jusqu'en 2014, le moteur de LaTeX incluait un bug léger dans
> >     % \addpenalty, du fichier ltspace.dtx (dans une TeXLive). Il était
> >     % corrigé via le fichier fixltx2e.dtx, qui était appelé en \usepackage.
> >     %    À partir de 2015, TeXLive a fusionné ces fichiers. Or le changement
> >     % dans la définition de \addpenalty a fait que des corrigés compilaient
> >     % différemment selon qu'ils étaient compilés sur une TeXLive 2014 (qui
> >     % était incluse dans la Debian stable début 2017) ou sur une TeXLive
> >     % 2015+ (cas d'Ubuntu et de la nouvelle Debian stable arrivée en milieu
> >     % de session).
> >     %    La correction de ce bug n'améliore pas les Annales en pratique. Il
> >     % est plus important que la compilation soit la même partout. C'est
> >     % pourquoi on met ci-dessous l'ancienne définition de \addpenalty.
> >
> >     The "%" symbols need to stay vertically aligned (let's say that "%" is
> >     in quotestr). Whatever happens after "%" does not count. Autoindent or
> >     not.
>
> Here you say that for comments autoindent does not matter, but in the 
> next paragraph you say that the justifying behavior for comments should 
> differ depending on whether autoindent is OFF or ON.  What am I 
> overlooking?

Sorry, that was confusing. In the paragraph above I was referring to the % 
symbols only. No matter how the text to the right is justified by ^J, the 
"%" have to stay vertically aligned--and I know this is Nano's current 
behavior. (No problem then.)

> >     In the comment's text, the separation into three paragraphs conveys
> >     meaning and should be preserved if the user wishes so: if autoindent is
> >     OFF, keep the paragraphs; if it is ON, fuse them together.
>
> Fuse together?  But nano has never done this.

Well, not in the case above but if I write:
        %<Tab>\noindent
        %<Tab>Some text
then a ^J will fuse the two lines into one, same point as before.

> nano should not justify things differently depending on the setting of 
> autoindent.

Why?

> In the above explanations you say that any indentation (when autoindent 
> is OFF) should mean: start-of-new-paragraph.  But I think that is 
> unnecessarily limiting: it would prevent justifying bullet items.

It wouldn't because bulleted lists work only when auto-indent is ON.

This is an example where Nano behaves differently depending on 
whether auto-indent is on or off :-)

> So, to see whether seeing only a TAB as the indicator of a new paragraph 
> is enough to bring back your desired justifying behavior, please try the 
> attached patch.  It should apply with only offset and no fuzz to 4.6.

It's CHRISTMAS!! Thanks alot for the present Father Benno!!


Kind regards,
Sébastien.