[Top][All Lists]
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: Paragraphs (and sentences) in Emacs cannot span pages.
From: |
Alan Mackenzie |
Subject: |
Re: Paragraphs (and sentences) in Emacs cannot span pages. |
Date: |
Wed, 7 Sep 2005 07:28:42 +0000 (GMT) |
Hi, Richard!
On Wed, 7 Sep 2005, Richard M. Stallman wrote:
> In printed material, sentences and paragraphs can (and frequently
> do) start on one page and finish on the next.
>That's because the pages are broken automatically.
>That's not how people normally use ^L in files they edit.
>Could you tell me more about the files you are editing
>and why they have ^L in the middle of paragraphs?
I haven't had any trouble with any actual file.
It was more a philosophical thing that occurred to me whilst documenting
pages, paragraphs and sentences in @node Standard Regexps in
searching.texi. I was wondering about the motivation for having
paragraphs and sentences constrained to be within single pages.
This is surely something which _can't_ be changed now. If the defaults
of paragraph-s\(tart\|eparate\) were changed to allow paragraphs to span
pages, then lots of little things would stop working.
But this is one way in which Emacs's pages/paragraphs/sentences don't
correspond with what people might expect, and I think I should write a
bit about it into the documentation, also telling hackers how to set
things up to have paragraphs spanning page breaks.
--
Alan Mackenzie (Munich, Germany)