Re: semantic newlines? Yes, I use that too.

[Alejandro Colomar]

Hi Bruno,

On 5/22/23 20:06, Bruno Haible wrote:
> Thanks for sharing your experience.
> 
> Nutchanon Wetchasit wrote:
>>> Of course,
>>> if you desire to interact with the microcontroller
>>> via serial communication,
>>> you are free to connect the RS-232 @samp{SERAIL} (sic) connector
>>> on the microcontroller board
>>> to a serial port on the PC
>>> with a null modem cable.@footnote{RS-232 null modem cable
>>> is not included in the kit.}
> 
> Hmm. I find this source to be hard to read, due to the many line breaks.
> 
> Maybe a reasonable compromise is to force a newline after each sentence,
> but not after each piece of sentence?

Kind of.  My rule is:

Always break after '.'.  No exceptions.

Most of the time, break after other punctuation, but allow tasteful
exceptions.

Apart from those, if a sentence is very long (>80), or if it helps
readability, break at clause or phrase boundaries as appropriate, but
don't do it gratuitously, as breaking too much also hurts readability.

I find that this helps also reading the source code, as it's easier to
follow the logic behind the sentences, more or less as you would do
when speaking, where you add slightly more (time) separation between
words at those same points.

Cheers,
Alex

> It should still keep the diffs
> small, since a sentence is typically much shorter than a paragraph.
> 
>> So, if you are aiming to use this technique on literature authoring
>> in general, watch out for this. Making occasional looks over
>> at the rendered version (bearing reasonable page width/column count)
>> also helps keeping this in check.
> 
> For texinfo, this occasional look at the rendered version is necessary
> anyway, in order to find where to place commands meant for esthetics
> (such as @noindent or @*).
> 
> Bruno
> 
> 
> 

-- 
<http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>
GPG key fingerprint: A9348594CE31283A826FBDD8D57633D441E25BB5

OpenPGP_signature
Description: OpenPGP digital signature