Word wrap
Peter E. Yee
word wrap slightly irritating? I wish descriptions and the like would flow
nicely on my screen without my having to mentally reassemble words.
-Peter Yee
y...@ames.arc.nasa.gov
ames!yee
James Seidman
>Is it just me (don't tell me), or do other TinyMUD players find the lack of
>word wrap slightly irritating? I wish descriptions and the like would flow
>nicely on my screen without my having to mentally reassemble words.
The GNU-Emacs tinymud.el program will take care of this, but it introduces
another problem. Some people think they're being really clever when they
format a description for an 80-column screen by putting in whitespace at the endof a line and by doing what I just did here, namely not having any space between
"end" and "of" so that it'll wrap properly. This makes things look really
silly for those of us who either use tinymud.el (and I assume Nightfall's
program) or who have other than 80-char screens. Maybe as better front-ends
proliferate this nasty formatting habit will disappear.
- Drax
Peter E. Yee
> ...
>"end" and "of" so that it'll wrap properly. This makes things look really
>silly for those of us who either use tinymud.el (and I assume Nightfall's
>program) or who have other than 80-char screens. Maybe as better front-ends
A pointer to Nightfall's program would be greatly appreciated.
-Peter Yee
y...@ames.arc.nasa.gov
ames!yee
Jon Blow
Ya know, I know whatcha mean. I don't use emacs, since I tend to find it
a total waste for the things I usually do; also emacs mode with Tinymud doesn't
give you enough line length (at least in my opinion,) so I don't use it.
I tried using the Unix fmt program to wordwrap incoming stuff, which was
somewhat successful, except that it tended to delete carriage returns. What a
bummer.
Right now my entire adventure is formatted to be easy-readable in 80
columns. This is also a pain, since 1) It takes much longer for me to write it,
and I constantly feel a loss of artistic quality when I am forced to reword so
that a line will fit; 2) People with wordwrap must turn it OFF, or the adventure
will look like Spam. Bummer.
I suggested the idea of building wordwrap directly into TinyMud, but fur
and Nymph violently opposed me, saying it would be too hard; i don't think so,
but then, I'm a Banzai, right? :) But I find that wordwrapped text reads much more
smoothly, and makes an adventure much more enjoyable.
-Buckaroo
"He had a deep face, which is to say his head was more than a hairball,
by which I mean he had brains enough to stick his hands in his pockets without
seeking an audience with the pope."
-Orson Scott Card
James Seidman
> Ya know, I know whatcha mean. I don't use emacs, since I tend to find it
>a total waste for the things I usually do; also emacs mode with Tinymud doesn't
>give you enough line length (at least in my opinion,) so I don't use it.
A quick fix for this is to insert a line in the tinymud_mode function that
sets the fill-column to 79. This will allow lines to take up the whole
width, rather than emacs' default, which seems to be about 65.
Anton Rang
> I suggested the idea of building wordwrap directly into
>TinyMud, but fur and Nymph violently opposed me, saying it would be
>too hard; i don't think so, but then, I'm a Banzai, right? :) But I
>find that wordwrapped text reads much more smoothly, and makes an
>adventure much more enjoyable.
It wouldn't be *hard* to build it in, but it doesn't make much sense
to put that in the server. For one thing, keeping the server as small
as possible means that it will be faster (definitely desirable, unless
someone would volunteer a faster machine for TinyMUD :-).
A better argument against putting it in the server is simple: word
wrap varies from system to system. Obviously, some people may use 80
columns and others use 132; a few people may even be using 40 or 64.
Less obviously, people with Macintoshes or the like may be using fonts
with proportional spacing (if not now, then in the future). In this
case, the server doesn't know how to do the wrapping....
Anton Rang (aka Tarrant)
+---------------------------+------------------+-------------+
| Anton Rang (grad student) | ra...@cs.wisc.edu | UW--Madison |
+---------------------------+------------------+-------------+
Felix Lee
> A better argument against putting it in the server is simple: word
>wrap varies from system to system.
Well, there could be a @wrap <n> command, default something normal for
80-column screens, and robots can @wrap 0, to keep their parsing sane.
I don't particularly care whether the server does wrapping or not.
--
Felix Lee fl...@shire.cs.psu.edu *!psuvax1!flee