Hmm... now this turns out to be another "soft vs. hard linebreaks" discussion? Interesting. Personally, I don't care whether Shout inserts hard linebreaks or relies on soft linebreaks when pretty-printing a piece of code. Yes, that could as well be a preference in Shout.

Best,
Marcel
Am 22.07.2022 00:45:47 schrieb Chris Muller <asqueaker at gmail.com>:
Compiler-cmm.480 is rooted in the idea that the format of comments is a human communication that fundamentally belongs to the author.  I _really_ think Compiler-mt.480 is the wrong approach if the goal is aesthetically "pleasing" comments.  I put that in quotes because it's your personal preference -- I myself very much dislike long comments to be indented because it prioritizes aesthetics over readability.  When a comment is long enough to take more than one line, it's worth seeing its delineation of that section of code in the left margin.

If you prefer them to be indented, please make a Shout preference that dynamically formats comments into indented paragraphs.  That solution ensures every width is a good width instead of trying to guess about it and, IMO, intruding terribly into the sovereignty of someone's hand-crafted comments because someone else prefers indentation.  Plus, an arbitrary width makes comments even harder to whenever the width you're reading in is narrower than the arbitrary width decided by the formatter (see screenshot, I picked a random method).

[formatting-code-good-comment-bad.png]


Squeak can do so much better, easily even, Text has supported indentation for years and years!

Best,
  Chris

On Wed, Jul 20, 2022 at 2:50 AM Marcel Taeumel <marcel.taeumel at hpi.de [mailto:marcel.taeumel at hpi.de]> wrote:

Hi all -

See Compiler-mt.480 (Inbox) for an alternative solution.

Best,
Marcel
Am 20.07.2022 09:36:46 schrieb Marcel Taeumel <marcel.taeumel at hpi.de [mailto:marcel.taeumel at hpi.de]>:
Hi Nicolas --

> [...] 75 em means that we'll get at least 75 chars...

Typography-wise, it just gets a little bit more complicated
with non-monospaced fonts. For a prosa comment in Squeak's
default proportional font, 75 em or 75 characters-per-line might
be much on screen considering English text.

At the moment, we have preferences to play around with this:
PluggableTextMorph softLineWrapAtVisualWrapBorder

PluggableTextMorph visualWrapBorder

PluggableTextMorph visualWrapBorderLimit


80 characters seem to be common for mono-spaced fonts.
On average, that value also seems to work with Squeak's
proportional Bitstream Vera Sans. It's a compromise. Tool
windows are not a sheet of real paper.

Best,
Marcel
Am 19.07.2022 22:19:32 schrieb Nicolas Cellier <nicolas.cellier.aka.nice at gmail.com [mailto:nicolas.cellier.aka.nice at gmail.com]>:
Hi all,
em is a typical unit used in latex. Since it's the largest latin letter in most fonts, 75 em means that we'll get at least 75 chars...
Nicolas


Le mar. 19 juil. 2022 à 14:50, Marcel Taeumel <marcel.taeumel at hpi.de [mailto:marcel.taeumel at hpi.de]> a écrit :

> I thought that the em would actually be a unit to get
> something like x characters in width, using M as the
> particular character as a basis.

Ah, right. Should work. Yet, I would not write a new
text composition algorithm but re-use our existing one.
And that one is based on either "type factor " or
"num chars".

Best,
Marcel
Am 19.07.2022 14:37:40 schrieb Jakob Reschke <jakres+squeak at gmail.com [mailto:jakres%2Bsqueak at gmail.com]>:
If the research has already been done, then there is no need for guessing and further suggestions. All the better :-)

I thought that the em would actually be a unit to get something like x characters in width, using M as the particular character as a basis.




Am Di., 19. Juli 2022 um 14:21 Uhr schrieb Marcel Taeumel <marcel.taeumel at hpi.de [mailto:marcel.taeumel at hpi.de]>:

> 75em may also be a good limit, now that Number even understands such a selector.

Nope. We need something independent from a scale factor and thus the default font size as pretty-printed format can be checked in. Better use "66 characters", not 75em. No rendering/font properties. For multi-line comments, use the line-break algorithm as in Text >> #withNoLineLongerThan:.

Please read the commentary in
TextStyle >> #compositionWidthForNumChars

Best,
Marcel
Am 14.07.2022 19:55:04 schrieb tim Rowledge <tim at rowledge.org [mailto:tim at rowledge.org]>:


> On 2022-07-14, at 10:48 AM, Jakob Reschke wrote:
>
> 75em may also be a good limit, now that Number even understands such a selector.
> https://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability [https://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability]

That's an excellent point; extra-long lines are really annoying to read in general.

>
> But seeing Tim's examples: before we start tweaking the indentation of comments by the pretty printer, which would have it insert tabs or spaces or anything else, better implement that proposal to display comment lines left-aligned with the opening ", without requiring indentation characters in the source text. Remember that other thread about whether or not to have line breaks in comments? Somebody posted a screenshot from Dolphin Smalltalk that shows what I am referring to.
>
> To leave the comments untouched by the pretty-printer seems reasonable to me for now.

Oh, I'm not wanting to have any tabs or spaces inserted - I want the formatting to be live and use the left indent. Shout does all that work to colour (etc) the text so why not use the fact that it detects comments.


tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org [mailto:tim at rowledge.org]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim [http://www.rowledge.org/tim]
Useful random insult:- His seat back is not in the full upright and locked position.






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