PureBasic Forums - English

Unfortunately, there are still users here in the forum who wrap continuous text with manual line breaks. We are writing the year 2019 and since roughly estimated 30 years the text program and/or the browser takes over this task.

Even if someone may think that shorter lines will improve the readability, only the opposite is achieved:

• This results in an unreadable flutter text on the mobile phone.
• An automatic translation of the text with Google translate or DeepL is impossible, since the translation programs always rate a line feed as the end of a sentence.

I would like to see this bad habit finally ended. Please take into account that other users also use a mobile phone or do not have English as their native language. Thanks.

Josh wrote:...
I would like to see this bad habit finally ended.
...

That isn't a bad habit to split long text in readable
portions.
You know why good books or newspapers put their
pages in columns? It increases readability immensely.
Lengthy lines are an imposition.

Lord wrote:

Josh wrote:...
I would like to see this bad habit finally ended.
...

That isn't a bad habit to split long text in readable portions. You know why good books or newspapers put their pages in columns? It increases readability immensely. Lengthy lines are an imposition.

But this is not the task of the writer but of the layouting engine. In this case the text should be columnized by a board template.

NicTheQuick wrote:...
But this is not the task of the writer but of the layouting engine. In this case the text should be columnized by a board template.

This can apply to a book or a newspaper.
In a forum it is the responsibility of the author.
Overlong lines (more than 40 to 60 characters)
are an unreasonable demand on any reader and
actually indicate that the writer is not interested
in his text being read.

@Lord
This is how your post may look like in a small window:
which..

Lord wrote:This can apply to a book or a
newspaper.
In a forum it is the responsibility of the
author.
Overlong lines (more than 40 to 60
characters)
are an unreasonable demand on any
reader and
actually indicate that the writer is not
interested
in his text being read.

It's far better than this on a normal or wide screen:

Lord wrote:This can apply to a book or a newspaper. In a forum it is the responsibility of the author. Overlong lines (more than 40 to 60 characters) are an unreasonable demand on any reader and actually indicate that the writer is not interested in his text being read.

I don't think It's better. The point is that with a flowing text a reader can easily get a narrow column by making the window smaller, or by other means. But he can't get easily a wider column if you insert line breaks.

#NULL wrote:I don't think It's better. The point is that with a flowing text a reader can easily get a narrow column by making the window smaller, or by other means. But he can't get easily a wider column if you insert line breaks.

And you think that a reader with a wider screen has to read
these long lines or has to resize his browser? What a crap!

If you use a large screen and a large window and then complain that everything is too large then I can't help you.

My vote is for avoiding line breaks in text that isn't source code so that the text flow wraps depending on the window size. On the other hand, line breaks should be used in source code freely to enhance readability.

@Lord: I find your recent postings hard to read because they appear to me in the same manner as #NULL has demonstrated. If you were able to guess everyone's screen size you could choose your placement of line breaks so that readability was maximized. But a one size fits all approach doesn't often work for the different ways and means your text may be viewed. Cheers.

Please do not forget the translation programs. For English-speaking forists, I have let translate a German text into English for illustration purposes. Two times translated from the same german text:

Google translator wrote:This is the translation of a text that is unnecessary
was broken. Due to the manual change it is for
Translation programs difficult, a correct translation
because the program can not be sure if it is
the newline is a new sentence.

Google translator wrote:This is the translation of a text that has not been unnecessarily wrapped. The manual wrap makes it difficult for a translation program to perform a correct translation because the program can not be sure that the line is a new sentence.

In a translation from the English forum to German, unnecessary line breaks often lead to an illegible text without any sense.

Josh wrote:...
In a translation from the English forum to German, unnecessary line breaks often lead to an illegible text without any sense.

So don't use translaters, instead learn the language.

Better yet learn to write translatable sentences.
This is an international forum and even if the posts are in English,
this forum would not be worth reading without the contribution of people who use google translate to post.
I like the PureBasic Forum because of the international flavor.


Norm.

Lord wrote:So don't use translaters, instead learn the language.

I speak English, not very well, but I can. Google translate and DeepL can definitely do it better. So I prefer to focus on what is essential in this forum and this is programming.

How many foreign languages do you speak?

Josh wrote:Unfortunately, there are still users here in the forum who wrap continuous text with manual line breaks.

I really
wonder on
how many
characters
they wrap.