11 ms·

Semantic Line Breaks (2017)

99 points by Bogdanp 1y ago

gorgoiler 1y ago
Prior art on writing line oriented prose comes from one B. Kernighan, no less! Via this blog post: https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2012/one-sentence-per-line/ https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2012/one-sentence-per-line/ > Start each sentence on a new line. Make lines short, and break lines at natural places, such as after commas and semicolons, rather than randomly. Since most people change documents by rewriting phrases and adding, deleting and rearranging sentences, these precautions simplify any editing you have to do later. — Brian Kernighan, 1974
- gregabbott 1y ago
  Related HN Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4642395 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4642395
- kps 1y ago
  This is how all the Unix documents were written. See e.g. https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/doc/cacm/p1 https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/doc/cacm/p...
- ThisNameIsTaken 1y ago
  I've been doing this for some time now and it indeed makes editing text in vim easy. Just `dd` and `p`. And as the article mentions, diffing is much cleaner. There's a caveat however, if you comment a line (to keep the thought, but see how it would work without) some Markdown parsers will interpret it as an empty line, and thus create a new paragraph. It then becomes necessary to remove one of the semantic newlines, which looks rather messy.
chrismorgan 1y ago
> A semantic line break SHOULD occur after an […] em dash (—). I agree with this, however it means that no existing markup language supports semantic line breaks, because every last one of them just turns the break into a space—and em dashes are, in most locales, not to be surrounded by a space. Consequently, you’ll end up with a stray space if you do this. My irritation at being unable to break after an em dash (which I want to do quite frequently) was one of the things that headed me down the path of designing my own lightweight markup language (LML), to fix this and other problems I observe with existing LMLs. I’ve been using it for all my personal writing for something like four years now (though a a fair bit has changed since then), and I expect to finally have a functioning parser before the end of this year. One of the other fun complications of this kind of line break in source code is languages that don’t have a word divider—inserting a space at all is incorrect in them. CSS presently just leaves such decisions UA-defined <https://drafts.csswg.org/css-text-4/#line-break-transform https://drafts.csswg.org/css-text-4/#line-break-transform>: > any remaining segment break is either transformed into a space (U+0020) or removed depending on the context before and after the break. The rules for this operation are UA-defined in this level. My LML currently turns segment breaks into a space unless the line ends with an en or em dash, unless there’s a colon or a space before that. I haven’t got anything in place for languages with no word separator yet, but it is unusually well-suited to such languages.
- photon_garden 1y ago
  More folks should define their own lightweight markup languages! It’s fun and makes your writing and notes feel more like your own. I created a convention for defining sub-notes (with frontmatter) in a Markdown note and have found it really helpful over the past few years.
- vthriller 1y ago
  > em dashes are, in most locales, not to be surrounded by a space This is definitely not the case for at least French and Russian, which means markup renderers now have to guess text language or force authors to declare such in some metadata header. And it gets even more complicated with inclusion of block quotes in different languages.
  - chrismorgan 1y ago
    It’s not hard and doesn’t need language awareness; I described how to detect it: if there’s no space before an end-of-line em dash, suppress the segment-break-replacing space.
    - tczMUFlmoNk 1y ago
      There seem to be some locales or styles that use asymmetric spacing. From the Zen of Python—note different spacing based on context and position within the sentence: There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it. Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch. [...] Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!
      - chrismorgan 1y ago
        You have missed a joke: https://bugs.python.org/issue3364 https://bugs.python.org/issue3364.
        tczMUFlmoNk 1y ago
account42 1y ago
The problem is that this makes having line breaks that are not paragraph breaks in the output much more awkward and I think those are much more important than line breaks that are only there in the source. This is especially true for Markdown which is supposed to be a pretty rendering of conventions that were already common in text only communication so it's weird when explicitly entered line breaks are ignored in the output.
- chrismorgan 1y ago
  The significant majority of markup languages essentially treat a single line breaks as a space. HTML, Markdown, et cetera. In lightweight markup languages, you normally need a blank line (i.e. two line breaks) to signify a paragraph break. GitHub issues and discussions are an outlier in treating them as hard single line breaks (which are not paragraph breaks). Most plain-text communication used to use line wrapping, often not supporting lines above, say, 100 characters. Just like typeset prose uses wrapping, because your paper isn’t infinitely wide.
- 3036e4 1y ago
  Good thing about Markdown is that the lack of a proper spec means you can pick one you like (when possible). Pandoc for instance treats input Markdown line-breaks in a sane way, allowing semantic breaks to not affect the output.
dorianmariecom 1y ago
i thought this was for ruby and javascript and this would be really cool. automated formatting including newlines, would be great.
eviks 1y ago
> Without any line breaks at all, this paragraph appears in source as a long, continuous line of text Of course it doesn't because > (which may be automatically wrapped at a fixed column length, depending on your editor settings): Indeed, are you short on apps that support this ancient text formatting feature? > Adding a line break after each sentence makes it easier to understand the shape and structure of the source text Nope again, visually you've just wasted my devices width or overestimated my smartphone's width and I get exactly the same issue you've just complained about: a single sentence that doesn't fit. Semantically, what you're looking for already exists and is called a paragraph. A sentence has a different meaning, which you break by line breaking after every single one. It kills the structure, not "makes it easier to understand the shape and structure of the source text" (also, bullet points exist) PS By the way, why deprive readers of extra clarity offered by this formatting? > We can further clarify the source text by adding a line break after the clause “with reason and conscience”. This helps to distinguish between the “and” used as a coordinating conjunction between “reason and conscience” and the “and” used as a subordinating conjunction with the clause
- dkh 1y ago
  I think you might be misunderstanding. The semantic line breaks described here are not shown to readers. They are visible only to the person writing/editing the text, as a tool for their own use. If you aren't someone who finds a tool like this useful for your own writing, then no worries! Nobody has been harmed by this existing but not being used. It has no effect on the result. While I never knew there was a name for this, I naturally do something very similar when writing, keeping thoughts separated by at least a line or two, even if I imagine they'll be in the same paragraph in the end result, just so I have a visual sense of where my different thoughts are and how long they are.
  - eviks 1y ago
    > are not shown to readers. Sure they are, though the spec hides some readers behind other names like "editors, and other collaborators" But also, have you never read the plain text / source of some markdown/other markup language written by someone else? Readme.md in its raw form? And the spec explicitly applies to plain text, so it's self-contradictory as "the final rendered output" of plain text is... itself.
tpoacher 1y ago
There is a very good technical argument for NOT using "semantic" line breaks when editing markup source code, especially of the "hardwrap" variety, and that is the ability to easily diff two versions of the same document, e.g. when comparing latex git commits. Anything that reorganises the sentence around for the sake of maintaining justification, completely destroys any meaningful diff from taking place. And ideally your editor should support both hard and soft wrapping, so that aesthetics of wrapping shouldn't be a big issue. And I say this as a fan of hardwrapping text.
- chrismorgan 1y ago
  I think you’ve got things back to front. Semantic line breaks improves diffing.
  - tpoacher 1y ago
    only if the individual lines aren't shifted about / re-justified, and it's only a matter of adding a new line in between existing lines. But with prose (like latex) this is rarely the case. A single word might rejustify the whole paragraph. So suddenly instead of diff showing you a single word change, it flags the whole paragraph.
anentropic 1y ago
I don't get it. TBH most of the time I find markdown's collapsing of whitespace annoying - if you want a 'visual' line-break you have to add unnatural double space at the end of preceding line. And even this is renderer dependent, I don't think is part of the spec (?) so some renderers don't respect it (and IIRC GitHub comments renderer does't need it, i.e. doesn't do semantic line breaks) Another pet hate is text editors which auto-convert double space into ". " - I find this even cropping up in IDEs now, so you try to add an end of line comment "...] # here" and it turns into "...]. # here". Awful
- chrismorgan 1y ago
  > if you want a 'visual' line-break you have to add unnatural double space at the end of preceding line. That’s just a bad syntax choice on Gruber’s part. CommonMark adds trailing backslash as an alternative, so that will work in most places these days. > And even this is renderer dependent, I don't think is part of the spec (?) Yes it is. Quoting https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax: “When you do want to insert a <br /> break tag using Markdown, you end a line with two or more spaces, then type return.” > IIRC GitHub comments renderer does't need it Yes, GitHub decided on a wilful violation of Markdown for issues and discussions. > text editors which auto-convert double space into ". " I have seen that as a feature on Android keyboards, but I would be very much surprised to find it in non-keyboard software.
  - antiframe 1y ago
    > That’s just a bad syntax choice on Gruber’s part. I believe Gruber was inspired by how people wrote emphasis in plain text emails and other text documents. Most MUA at the time would treat trailing whitespace as a hard rather than soft line break. This is from my--now aging--memory, and I can't find a source to corroborate. I do recall, though, there were clients that didn't do it well (ahem, Outlook), and would break plain text formatting of deeply-nested quoted text. (Don't even get me started on how Outlook single-handedly changed culture from bottom posting to top posting).
    - 1y ago
riffraff 1y ago
this seems to consider "text being read after formatting" and "text being read before formatting" as different things. Which I guess, if you're the sole author of the text might be true. But in my experience most text that gets rendered is also read and edited by multiple people in its source form, so why wouldn't you want to make source just as easy to read?
- simonbw 1y ago
  I think it's about optimizing for different types of reading. When you're reading the final text, you're reading to absorb the content. When you're reading the source text, you're reading to find edits you want to make. Using more line breaks is a way of making the document easier to scan if you're familiar with the "shape" of it.
pabs3 1y ago
Wonder if any linters know about this convention.
layer8 1y ago
The main reason I use semantic line breaks, not explicitly mentioned in this article, is that it minimizes reformatting when editing. Only the subclause being edited is reformatted, while the rest of the paragraph remains as-is. This also minimizes the changes in line-oriented diffs. While one could rely on automated line-wrapping instead of using hard line breaks that require reformatting, it isn’t usefully available in all environments, in particular for indented paragraphs and when having elements like ASCII art or code that shouldn’t be word-wrapped, and it makes plain-text diffs larger than necessary when whole paragraphs are on a single source line.
- necovek 1y ago
  Wouldn't putting a single word per line minimize reformatting and changes in line-diffs further? From an opposite angle, I imagine you do not use semantic line breaks in ASCII art or code that shouldn't be word-wrapped, so I imagine why not push for that too? Mostly to point out that this is a micro-optimization for little demonstrable benefit.
admko 1y ago
I made a command-line tool [0] powered by Transformer models that performs semantic linebreaks to breaks lines in a text file at semantic boundaries. It supports multiple file types including LaTeX, Markdown, and plain text, with automatic file type detection. [0]: https://github.com/admk/sembr https://github.com/admk/sembr
ivansavz 1y ago
The article mentions the git diffing command `git diff --word-diff`, which is cool, but I find an even better version to be: git diff --color-words which shows words removed in red, and words added in blue. The output produced is similar to `latexdiff` in case you're familiar.
- geocar 1y ago
  Hi buddy you might be colorblind: git diff uses green for added things, not blue. That includes --color-words. You might've also changed your color theme and forgotten. You can pipe through less (or something else that doesn't understand the control code) and look for ^[[31m is red; ^[[32m is green; ^[[34m would be blue (although ^[[36m is kindof a light blue/cyan) to tell if you've reconfigured your terminal, or you've reconfigured git's default colors, but if you haven't done either you might want to get your color-vision checked!
  - ivansavz 1y ago
    Oh yes, I found this in my `~/.gitconfig`: [color "diff"] plain = normal meta = bold frag = cyan old = red new = blue I guess I changed to match the red-blue color convention I'm used to from latexdiff.
jsdalton 1y ago
I’ve often thought this would be useful for version control and change review, since it allows diffs to be a lot less noisy. I’m imagining how much easier it would be to review a PR with significant README edits if the file was already structured with semantic line breaks. I’ve previously had the above thought and applied it to the end of sentences, but the idea of introducing them at the level of semantic thought had not occurred to me. But if this is where we’re going I’d start to wish for indentation possibilities. I’ve do this frequently with SQL statements, introducing both line breaks and indentations to provide a visual structure that mimics the semantic structure of clauses and the details they contain.
- meatmanek 1y ago
  Indeed. Edits show up as a -/+ on just the sentence or clause that has changed. Contrast with hard-wrapped text, where a single word change towards the beginning of a paragraph can cause the entire paragraph to be replaced in the diff view, as things reflow.
huflungdung 1y ago
[dead]
Thorrez 1y ago
If your editor auto reflows the text, that will conflict with this, by erasing line breaks you inserted. This is imposing an 80-character line length limit. With a line length limit, I want an editor to reflow my text so I don't have to do the line length limit manually.
- layer8 1y ago
  Many editors allow reformatting a user-selected portion or the current line, and some even the current sentence, with a simple keyboard shortcut.
  - Thorrez 1y ago
    Reflowing the current line won't work. If I delete a word, I need the next line's text to be flowed up to join with the current line. And that might require reflowing of subsequent lines as well. Reflowing the current sentence won't work, because this style involves inserting semantic line breaks in certain places within a single sentence. Reformatting a user selected portion is going to take more effort on my part. Currently my editor reflows the entire file every time the file is saved; I don't have to think about which part to reflow.
myfonj 1y ago
> are not shown to readers. I also wonder, why conceal bits of information from readers, while they could possibly benefit of them the same way editors and writers do. Admittedly, the outcome then seem like a poetry, but … why not? To give it a shot on that page, simple way to see these breaks it to run document.body.insertAdjacentHTML ( 'afterend' ,`<style>p, li { white-space: pre-line; }</style>` ) in devtools console. (Using `pre-wrap` instead of `pre-line` is also interesting: indents "wrapped" lines by the source code indent, what gives it even more clarity. (By the way, HN comments also preserve line breaks in the source output, but unless revealed by some extra style, they are usually not presented on the surface.)
- bmacho 1y ago
  Here's a userscript to apply it automatically, and show all the extra whitespaces people put in their comments. (There aren't many.) // ==UserScript== // @name HN comments show whitespace // @description Changes HackerNews CSS to show comments with original whitesapaces // @match https://news.ycombinator.com/* // @run-at document-body // @grant none // ==/UserScript== // HN inserts a newline after <pre> so formatted code blocks have a whole newline after them // but we can remove that extra space with negative margin const HN_noformat_CSS_rule = ` div.commtext.c00 { white-space: pre-wrap !important; } div.commtext.c00 > pre { margin-bottom: -.25em !important; } `; let myStyleHolder = document.createElement('style'); myStyleHolder.textContent = HN_noformat_CSS_rule; document.head.appendChild(myStyleHolder);
marttt 1y ago
This seems related to "ventilated prose", as invented by Buckminster Fuller: https://vanemden.wordpress.com/2009/01/01/ventilated-prose/ https://vanemden.wordpress.com/2009/01/01/ventilated-prose/ I can confirm that while this technique feels odd at first, it does prove very useful when you need to edit or shorten a "wall of text", or express something very concisely. Somehow, the relevant/irrelevant parts of a sentence or thought stand out better this way. IIRC, I even wrote a simple Vimscript function back in the day to join a "ventilated" secton back into a traditional, coherent sentence.

99 points by Bogdanp 1y ago

Prior art on writing line oriented prose comes from one B. Kernighan, no less! Via this blog post: https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2012/one-sentence-per-line/ https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2012/one-sentence-per-line/ > Start each sentence on a new line. Make lines short, and break lines at natural places, such as after commas and semicolons, rather than randomly. Since most people change documents by rewriting phrases and adding, deleting and rearranging sentences, these precautions simplify any editing you have to do later. — Brian Kernighan, 1974

gregabbott 1y ago
Related HN Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4642395 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4642395
kps 1y ago
This is how all the Unix documents were written. See e.g. https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/doc/cacm/p1 https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/doc/cacm/p...
ThisNameIsTaken 1y ago
I've been doing this for some time now and it indeed makes editing text in vim easy. Just `dd` and `p`. And as the article mentions, diffing is much cleaner. There's a caveat however, if you comment a line (to keep the thought, but see how it would work without) some Markdown parsers will interpret it as an empty line, and thus create a new paragraph. It then becomes necessary to remove one of the semantic newlines, which looks rather messy.

chrismorgan 1y ago

> A semantic line break SHOULD occur after an […] em dash (—). I agree with this, however it means that no existing markup language supports semantic line breaks, because every last one of them just turns the break into a space—and em dashes are, in most locales, not to be surrounded by a space. Consequently, you’ll end up with a stray space if you do this. My irritation at being unable to break after an em dash (which I want to do quite frequently) was one of the things that headed me down the path of designing my own lightweight markup language (LML), to fix this and other problems I observe with existing LMLs. I’ve been using it for all my personal writing for something like four years now (though a a fair bit has changed since then), and I expect to finally have a functioning parser before the end of this year. One of the other fun complications of this kind of line break in source code is languages that don’t have a word divider—inserting a space at all is incorrect in them. CSS presently just leaves such decisions UA-defined <https://drafts.csswg.org/css-text-4/#line-break-transform https://drafts.csswg.org/css-text-4/#line-break-transform>: > any remaining segment break is either transformed into a space (U+0020) or removed depending on the context before and after the break. The rules for this operation are UA-defined in this level. My LML currently turns segment breaks into a space unless the line ends with an en or em dash, unless there’s a colon or a space before that. I haven’t got anything in place for languages with no word separator yet, but it is unusually well-suited to such languages.

photon_garden 1y ago
More folks should define their own lightweight markup languages! It’s fun and makes your writing and notes feel more like your own. I created a convention for defining sub-notes (with frontmatter) in a Markdown note and have found it really helpful over the past few years.
vthriller 1y ago
> em dashes are, in most locales, not to be surrounded by a space This is definitely not the case for at least French and Russian, which means markup renderers now have to guess text language or force authors to declare such in some metadata header. And it gets even more complicated with inclusion of block quotes in different languages.
- chrismorgan 1y ago
  It’s not hard and doesn’t need language awareness; I described how to detect it: if there’s no space before an end-of-line em dash, suppress the segment-break-replacing space.
  - tczMUFlmoNk 1y ago
    There seem to be some locales or styles that use asymmetric spacing. From the Zen of Python—note different spacing based on context and position within the sentence: There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it. Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch. [...] Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!
    - chrismorgan 1y ago
      You have missed a joke: https://bugs.python.org/issue3364 https://bugs.python.org/issue3364.
      - tczMUFlmoNk 1y ago

account42 1y ago

The problem is that this makes having line breaks that are not paragraph breaks in the output much more awkward and I think those are much more important than line breaks that are only there in the source. This is especially true for Markdown which is supposed to be a pretty rendering of conventions that were already common in text only communication so it's weird when explicitly entered line breaks are ignored in the output.

chrismorgan 1y ago
The significant majority of markup languages essentially treat a single line breaks as a space. HTML, Markdown, et cetera. In lightweight markup languages, you normally need a blank line (i.e. two line breaks) to signify a paragraph break. GitHub issues and discussions are an outlier in treating them as hard single line breaks (which are not paragraph breaks). Most plain-text communication used to use line wrapping, often not supporting lines above, say, 100 characters. Just like typeset prose uses wrapping, because your paper isn’t infinitely wide.
3036e4 1y ago
Good thing about Markdown is that the lack of a proper spec means you can pick one you like (when possible). Pandoc for instance treats input Markdown line-breaks in a sane way, allowing semantic breaks to not affect the output.

dorianmariecom 1y ago

i thought this was for ruby and javascript and this would be really cool. automated formatting including newlines, would be great.

eviks 1y ago

> Without any line breaks at all, this paragraph appears in source as a long, continuous line of text Of course it doesn't because > (which may be automatically wrapped at a fixed column length, depending on your editor settings): Indeed, are you short on apps that support this ancient text formatting feature? > Adding a line break after each sentence makes it easier to understand the shape and structure of the source text Nope again, visually you've just wasted my devices width or overestimated my smartphone's width and I get exactly the same issue you've just complained about: a single sentence that doesn't fit. Semantically, what you're looking for already exists and is called a paragraph. A sentence has a different meaning, which you break by line breaking after every single one. It kills the structure, not "makes it easier to understand the shape and structure of the source text" (also, bullet points exist) PS By the way, why deprive readers of extra clarity offered by this formatting? > We can further clarify the source text by adding a line break after the clause “with reason and conscience”. This helps to distinguish between the “and” used as a coordinating conjunction between “reason and conscience” and the “and” used as a subordinating conjunction with the clause

dkh 1y ago
I think you might be misunderstanding. The semantic line breaks described here are not shown to readers. They are visible only to the person writing/editing the text, as a tool for their own use. If you aren't someone who finds a tool like this useful for your own writing, then no worries! Nobody has been harmed by this existing but not being used. It has no effect on the result. While I never knew there was a name for this, I naturally do something very similar when writing, keeping thoughts separated by at least a line or two, even if I imagine they'll be in the same paragraph in the end result, just so I have a visual sense of where my different thoughts are and how long they are.
- eviks 1y ago
  > are not shown to readers. Sure they are, though the spec hides some readers behind other names like "editors, and other collaborators" But also, have you never read the plain text / source of some markdown/other markup language written by someone else? Readme.md in its raw form? And the spec explicitly applies to plain text, so it's self-contradictory as "the final rendered output" of plain text is... itself.

tpoacher 1y ago

There is a very good technical argument for NOT using "semantic" line breaks when editing markup source code, especially of the "hardwrap" variety, and that is the ability to easily diff two versions of the same document, e.g. when comparing latex git commits. Anything that reorganises the sentence around for the sake of maintaining justification, completely destroys any meaningful diff from taking place. And ideally your editor should support both hard and soft wrapping, so that aesthetics of wrapping shouldn't be a big issue. And I say this as a fan of hardwrapping text.

chrismorgan 1y ago
I think you’ve got things back to front. Semantic line breaks improves diffing.
- tpoacher 1y ago
  only if the individual lines aren't shifted about / re-justified, and it's only a matter of adding a new line in between existing lines. But with prose (like latex) this is rarely the case. A single word might rejustify the whole paragraph. So suddenly instead of diff showing you a single word change, it flags the whole paragraph.

anentropic 1y ago

I don't get it. TBH most of the time I find markdown's collapsing of whitespace annoying - if you want a 'visual' line-break you have to add unnatural double space at the end of preceding line. And even this is renderer dependent, I don't think is part of the spec (?) so some renderers don't respect it (and IIRC GitHub comments renderer does't need it, i.e. doesn't do semantic line breaks) Another pet hate is text editors which auto-convert double space into ". " - I find this even cropping up in IDEs now, so you try to add an end of line comment "...] # here" and it turns into "...]. # here". Awful

chrismorgan 1y ago
> if you want a 'visual' line-break you have to add unnatural double space at the end of preceding line. That’s just a bad syntax choice on Gruber’s part. CommonMark adds trailing backslash as an alternative, so that will work in most places these days. > And even this is renderer dependent, I don't think is part of the spec (?) Yes it is. Quoting https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax: “When you do want to insert a <br /> break tag using Markdown, you end a line with two or more spaces, then type return.” > IIRC GitHub comments renderer does't need it Yes, GitHub decided on a wilful violation of Markdown for issues and discussions. > text editors which auto-convert double space into ". " I have seen that as a feature on Android keyboards, but I would be very much surprised to find it in non-keyboard software.
- antiframe 1y ago
  > That’s just a bad syntax choice on Gruber’s part. I believe Gruber was inspired by how people wrote emphasis in plain text emails and other text documents. Most MUA at the time would treat trailing whitespace as a hard rather than soft line break. This is from my--now aging--memory, and I can't find a source to corroborate. I do recall, though, there were clients that didn't do it well (ahem, Outlook), and would break plain text formatting of deeply-nested quoted text. (Don't even get me started on how Outlook single-handedly changed culture from bottom posting to top posting).
  - 1y ago

riffraff 1y ago

this seems to consider "text being read after formatting" and "text being read before formatting" as different things. Which I guess, if you're the sole author of the text might be true. But in my experience most text that gets rendered is also read and edited by multiple people in its source form, so why wouldn't you want to make source just as easy to read?

simonbw 1y ago
I think it's about optimizing for different types of reading. When you're reading the final text, you're reading to absorb the content. When you're reading the source text, you're reading to find edits you want to make. Using more line breaks is a way of making the document easier to scan if you're familiar with the "shape" of it.

pabs3 1y ago

Wonder if any linters know about this convention.

layer8 1y ago

The main reason I use semantic line breaks, not explicitly mentioned in this article, is that it minimizes reformatting when editing. Only the subclause being edited is reformatted, while the rest of the paragraph remains as-is. This also minimizes the changes in line-oriented diffs. While one could rely on automated line-wrapping instead of using hard line breaks that require reformatting, it isn’t usefully available in all environments, in particular for indented paragraphs and when having elements like ASCII art or code that shouldn’t be word-wrapped, and it makes plain-text diffs larger than necessary when whole paragraphs are on a single source line.

necovek 1y ago
Wouldn't putting a single word per line minimize reformatting and changes in line-diffs further? From an opposite angle, I imagine you do not use semantic line breaks in ASCII art or code that shouldn't be word-wrapped, so I imagine why not push for that too? Mostly to point out that this is a micro-optimization for little demonstrable benefit.

admko 1y ago

I made a command-line tool [0] powered by Transformer models that performs semantic linebreaks to breaks lines in a text file at semantic boundaries. It supports multiple file types including LaTeX, Markdown, and plain text, with automatic file type detection. [0]: https://github.com/admk/sembr https://github.com/admk/sembr

ivansavz 1y ago

The article mentions the git diffing command `git diff --word-diff`, which is cool, but I find an even better version to be: git diff --color-words which shows words removed in red, and words added in blue. The output produced is similar to `latexdiff` in case you're familiar.

geocar 1y ago
Hi buddy you might be colorblind: git diff uses green for added things, not blue. That includes --color-words. You might've also changed your color theme and forgotten. You can pipe through less (or something else that doesn't understand the control code) and look for ^[[31m is red; ^[[32m is green; ^[[34m would be blue (although ^[[36m is kindof a light blue/cyan) to tell if you've reconfigured your terminal, or you've reconfigured git's default colors, but if you haven't done either you might want to get your color-vision checked!
- ivansavz 1y ago
  Oh yes, I found this in my `~/.gitconfig`: [color "diff"] plain = normal meta = bold frag = cyan old = red new = blue I guess I changed to match the red-blue color convention I'm used to from latexdiff.

jsdalton 1y ago

I’ve often thought this would be useful for version control and change review, since it allows diffs to be a lot less noisy. I’m imagining how much easier it would be to review a PR with significant README edits if the file was already structured with semantic line breaks. I’ve previously had the above thought and applied it to the end of sentences, but the idea of introducing them at the level of semantic thought had not occurred to me. But if this is where we’re going I’d start to wish for indentation possibilities. I’ve do this frequently with SQL statements, introducing both line breaks and indentations to provide a visual structure that mimics the semantic structure of clauses and the details they contain.

meatmanek 1y ago
Indeed. Edits show up as a -/+ on just the sentence or clause that has changed. Contrast with hard-wrapped text, where a single word change towards the beginning of a paragraph can cause the entire paragraph to be replaced in the diff view, as things reflow.

huflungdung 1y ago

[dead]

Thorrez 1y ago

If your editor auto reflows the text, that will conflict with this, by erasing line breaks you inserted. This is imposing an 80-character line length limit. With a line length limit, I want an editor to reflow my text so I don't have to do the line length limit manually.

layer8 1y ago
Many editors allow reformatting a user-selected portion or the current line, and some even the current sentence, with a simple keyboard shortcut.
- Thorrez 1y ago
  Reflowing the current line won't work. If I delete a word, I need the next line's text to be flowed up to join with the current line. And that might require reflowing of subsequent lines as well. Reflowing the current sentence won't work, because this style involves inserting semantic line breaks in certain places within a single sentence. Reformatting a user selected portion is going to take more effort on my part. Currently my editor reflows the entire file every time the file is saved; I don't have to think about which part to reflow.

myfonj 1y ago

> are not shown to readers. I also wonder, why conceal bits of information from readers, while they could possibly benefit of them the same way editors and writers do. Admittedly, the outcome then seem like a poetry, but … why not? To give it a shot on that page, simple way to see these breaks it to run document.body.insertAdjacentHTML ( 'afterend' ,`<style>p, li { white-space: pre-line; }</style>` ) in devtools console. (Using `pre-wrap` instead of `pre-line` is also interesting: indents "wrapped" lines by the source code indent, what gives it even more clarity. (By the way, HN comments also preserve line breaks in the source output, but unless revealed by some extra style, they are usually not presented on the surface.)

bmacho 1y ago
Here's a userscript to apply it automatically, and show all the extra whitespaces people put in their comments. (There aren't many.) // ==UserScript== // @name HN comments show whitespace // @description Changes HackerNews CSS to show comments with original whitesapaces // @match https://news.ycombinator.com/* // @run-at document-body // @grant none // ==/UserScript== // HN inserts a newline after <pre> so formatted code blocks have a whole newline after them // but we can remove that extra space with negative margin const HN_noformat_CSS_rule = ` div.commtext.c00 { white-space: pre-wrap !important; } div.commtext.c00 > pre { margin-bottom: -.25em !important; } `; let myStyleHolder = document.createElement('style'); myStyleHolder.textContent = HN_noformat_CSS_rule; document.head.appendChild(myStyleHolder);

marttt 1y ago

This seems related to "ventilated prose", as invented by Buckminster Fuller: https://vanemden.wordpress.com/2009/01/01/ventilated-prose/ https://vanemden.wordpress.com/2009/01/01/ventilated-prose/ I can confirm that while this technique feels odd at first, it does prove very useful when you need to edit or shorten a "wall of text", or express something very concisely. Somehow, the relevant/irrelevant parts of a sentence or thought stand out better this way. IIRC, I even wrote a simple Vimscript function back in the day to join a "ventilated" secton back into a traditional, coherent sentence.