Confusing textwrap parameters, and request for RE help

[Peter J. Holzer]

On 2020-03-25 10:02:50 +1300, DL Neil via Python-list wrote:
> Today it feels like an anachronism because it is comes from the era of
> fixed-width fonts and line-lengths denominated in characters*. The issue is
> that it was designed to re-define 'white space' and to enable the conversion
> of text 'wrapped' in one (fixed) format, to suit another. With the
> arrival?predominance of proportional-width fonts, the skills of hyphenation
> have started to go the way of cursive hand-writing

That sounds like a non-sequitur to me. Books have always[1] used pro-
portional fonts and of course hand-writing is proportional, too. Both
use hyphenation. Fixed width fonts were only used by typewriters and
later character based terminals and printers. They waned after bitmapped
GUIs and printers became common.

If anything, I think it was fixed-width fonts which contributed to the
decline of hyphenation: With a fixed-width font you can't get a proper
justification anyway, and if your right margin is ragged, hyphenation is
much less important (at least in English, were most words are short -
it's different in German). And given that hyphenation is a really hard
problem even for a single language, it is not very surprising that most
programs don't even try.

        hp

[1] Except for a few textbooks from the early 1980s which hit the narrow
    window between "I have a computer so I don't need a professional
    typesetter" and "My computer now has proportional fonts").


-- 
   _  | Peter J. Holzer    | Story must make more sense than reality.
|_|_) |                    |
| |   | hjp at hjp.at         |    -- Charles Stross, "Creative writing
__/   | http://www.hjp.at/ |       challenge!"
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