[Geany] Problem with paragraph wrap function

[Russell Dickenson]

On 17 February 2011 13:46, Lex Trotman <elextr at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 17 February 2011 13:38, Russell Dickenson <russelldickenson at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I often use Geany's paragraph wrap function - tied to Control+J - but
>> have a minor problem. I have set "Line breaking column" to '80' and
>> "Long line marker" also to '80. The paragraph wrap function works as I
>> expect, except for one minor point. I am expecting the lines to be
>> wrapped at the 80 column mark but instead the lines are being wrapped
>> a little short of this.
>>
>> I just did a test, for example, and had the word "it" wrapped onto a
>> new line when in fact it would have been able to fit on the previous
>> line. Do I misunderstand how this function is to work, or have I
>> mis-configured the line length settings?
>
> Hi Russell,
>
> Geany uses Line breaking column if its set, otherwise it uses the long
> line display setting if its set, so I'd say you have them set right.
>
> The splitting is done by Scintilla the editing component Geany uses.
> I have also noticed that it seems to be somewhat pessimistic about
> what will fit on the line, though it is accurate about deciding when
> to split lines.  Same goes for wrapping lines at the window edge,
> although note that in that case it has to leave room for the wrap
> marker which makes its pessimism more understandable.
>
> I think it might be doing the same for split lines.
>
> I notice also in the Scintilla bugs it says that some extra space is
> left at the end of lines due to italics problems, don't know if thats
> part of it.
>
> If it is a problem for you try submitting a bug on Scintilla,
> http://www.scintilla.org/.

Thanks for your detailed explanation. I think I will raise a bug
against Scintilla. In the meantime I might try setting the "Line
breaking column" to longer than the "Long line display" number, and
see what results I get. Of course I would then have text temporarily
past the long line indicator but that's OK because it's only an
indicator and there are times when you don't want lines being broken.
For those where I do want the text to remain within the 80 columns (in
this case), having the line break number set to higher may give the
right result when I activate the "Rewrap paragraph" function. I'll
report my results here whatever happens.

>
> By the way all bets are off if you are not using a single fixed width
> font since "column" is meaningless in that case :-)

It's always best to check this but yes, I am using a monospace font.