> a list of items meant to appear as individual lines, that should not be merged. Do you literally mean a list, like LaTeX itemize, description, or enumerate?

> a list of items meant to appear as individual lines, that should not be merged. Do you literally mean a list, like LaTeX itemize, description, or enumerate? Then the markup (whatever it is) should indicate that. In plain text that was going to remain in plain text form, I would put list items with double line breaks between them, and leading asterisks. This avoids any ambiguity. I don't know any other scenario where I would want the items to appear as individual lines, but not as paragraphs. > Wouldn't it be better to revise diff so that it presents a subset of a paragraph containing the difference text As I already said, some diff algorithms already do that, but as far as I know there are NO merge algorithms that do it. (BTW just in case of terminological confusion: when I say "merge algorithm" I'm referring to version control-style merging of edits; when you say "merge algorithm" you're referring to paragraph-merging, the process of putting multiple lines together into a single paragraph.)