Confusing textwrap parameters, and request for RE help

[Richard Damon]

On 3/25/20 3:52 PM, Peter J. Holzer wrote:
> 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").

Actually, fixed width fonts are easy to justify, you just add additional 
space between words through the line. The varying spaces between words can 
be a bit annoying, but it was done. My thought is that variable width fonts
tend to put more characters per inch. and with wider screens we are no longer
trying as hard to keep to less than 80 characters per line (or less with margins),
so with micros-spacing justification the larger variance in natural line width isn't
as noticable.






-- 
Richard Damon