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

[Nutchanon Wetchasit]

On Sun, 21 May 2023, Bruno Haible wrote:

> Has anyone already used this convention for .texi files? Is it a
> good convention to follow?

Buckminster Fuller's ventilated prose technique from 1930s? [1]
Brian Kernighan's `ed`iting recommendation from 1970s? [2]
Semantic newline realization from 2010s? [3]

Yes of course, I have been using in this one-phrase-per-line
technique for quite some time (6+ years I think), I have applied it
in Markdown [4], DocBook XML [5], HTML [6], Troff-Man [7],
GNU Texinfo (see below), and (once in a blue moon) USENET/Netnews
and email [8] too.

It has been a very useful technique for authoring documents that are
version-controlled. (And on rare occassion when I do really
`ed` things, I also favor this kind of phrasing as well)

Anyway, for your exact question, in my new (yet to be released) documentation
project written in GNU Texinfo, I'm using it as well; from the start actually.
Following is a .txi source excerpt from the current draft:

> 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.}

A diff hunk of the above passage I randomly picked from revisions
found in the "blame" view looked like this:

> --- a/article.txi
> +++ b/article.txi
> @@ -522,5 +522,5 @@ @chapter Wiring Guide
>  you are free to connect the RS-232 @samp{SERAIL} (sic) connector
>  on the microcontroller board
> -to the PC
> +to a serial port on the PC
>  with a null modem cable.@footnote{RS-232 null modem cable
>  is not included in the kit.}

So, yeah; it would be great if you are going to use this as well.

Small tangent note though: if you are going to use this technique
on non-technical literature e.g. articles, novels and whatnot [9]...
I found that while this framed my mind differently and allowed me
to freely write my thoughts down in fragments of phrases and clauses;
I would often lose track of how large the paragraph
I kept appending onto was.

(Because, you know, since the lines were now in wildly
unequal length, it become kinda difficult to visually gauge
how long the paragraph had already been)

Once the result got rendered into the target viewing format,
I would often find myself facing big walls of text; and ended up
having to spend considerable amount time to split (and sometimes,
partially-rewrite) them into smaller digestible chunks.

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.

Cheers,
Nutchanon Wetchasit


[1] https://vanemden.wordpress.com/2009/01/01/ventilated-prose/
[2] 
https://web.archive.org/web/20130108163017if_/http://miffy.tom-yam.or.jp:80/2238/ref/beg.pdf
    ^ Page 10.
[3] https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2012/one-sentence-per-line/
[4] Not all Markdown dialects allow this. Original Markdown does,
    while (heaven-forbid) GitHub Markdown doesn't.
    I personally use original Markdown.
    Note that I haven't checked about this on too many dialects.
[5] https://sourceforge.net/p/sj4000programming/code/ci/master/tree/book.xml
[6] https://xwindows.in.th/
    ^ See the source code of this page.
[7] https://xwindows.in.th/fortuned/files/0.1.0/fortuned-0.1.0.tar.gz
    ^ See fortuned-0.1.0/fortune.6 inside.
[8] Taking advantage of RFC 2646/3676's `text/plain; format=flowed`
    content type.
    <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2646.html>
    <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3676.html>
    ^ The main drawback is it relies on trailing space,
      which not all editors got convenient facility to highlight;
      and while major desktop mail/news clients support it,
      TUI clients sometimes don't-- and the recipient would see
      a poetic recite of the passage (as you written) in those cases.
[9] I use VCS on those too (usually GNU RCS, sometimes also Git);
    that'd probably make me a "version control-freak" hahaha.
    *ba-dum-tss*