Re: Documentation guidlines (Was: 2nd try at date/format.rb & pty.c)

On Aug 20, 2006, at 9:46 AM, Randy Kramer wrote:

> On Sunday 20 August 2006 04:39 am, Eric Hodel wrote:
>> On Aug 19, 2006, at 5:46 PM, Eric Hodel wrote:
>>> * Documentation wrapped to 80 characters
>
> Sorry, I missed the original post that included that (and hope I  
> have the
> attribution right), but want to comment (or question) now.
>
>
> I'm assuming that the guideline cited above is aimed at (possibly  
> among other
> things), aimed at (i.e., against) documentation that requires  
> horizontal
> scrolling to view the full length of a line?
>
> While I am fiercely against  documentation that requires such  
> horizontal
> scrolling, I'm not sure that is the best way to achieve that  
> objective.
>
> In general, I much prefer when documentation is not "hard  
> wrapped" (with
> embedded \n (or similar) characters) but is free to be "soft  
> wrapped" by the
> displaying application (and thus be wrapped (dynamically) to the  
> width of the
> current viewing window).

Well, my impression is that it's for the code.  If you soft wrap  
code, it starts becoming hard to tell where the comments start and  
stop.  Although often the text editor can tell you.  If you're making  
some quick change, maybe you don't have all your best editors  
available for whatever reason.

If it's any consolation, the resulting HTML from rdoc is soft-wrapped.

-Mat