zim-wiki team mailing list archive

[Svenn Are Bjerkem <svenn.bjerkem@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 14 October 2015 at 14:50, Jaap Karssenberg <jaap.karssenberg@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

> Sorry, but I don't understand the issue. Why are they hard to read?
> Normally zim wraps lines at the width of the screen


I guess, that with the upcoming 4k and 8k monitors in 30 inch and more
size, a full-screen zim will cause most paragraphs to be one line from left
screen edge to right screen edge. I don't have such a screen, but I have
1920x1200 24 inch monitors, and experience a slight unease as I have to
turn my head to follow the line I am reading. I am also losing track of
where I am on the screen If I have to look down on the keyboard and the
text insert point is somewhere in the middle of a paragraph or text.

Now, it can be discussed whether it is sensible to have applications
running in full screen on such monitors, but that is a different topic.

My own experience is that when lines are allowed to wrap on screen edge, a
piece of text will look different depending on how much space I allow the
Index browser to occupy. This is a bit annoying when reading passages of
text that I know fairly well, like specifications and use case
descriptions. The lines are broken differently because of different pane
size.

I don't know if the gtk widget can have a break-lines-at-column. In vim it
is possible to set such a parameter. When viewing and editing in vim, the
lines are broken visually, but no hard newlines are inserted. Nice reading
lengths are 80 columns or max 132 in my eyes.

This email is written in gmail, which also allows lines to be as long as
the width of the screen estate available, and that is one of the things I
hate most about gmail. If I read an email from somebody else, and that
email has been nicely broken at 80 columns, I feel the frustration of not
being able to have my own emails being broken at 80 columns. Text is much
faster to read with short lines. I guess this because only the eyes are
moving and not the head.

Now, when all that is said, I have to note that it is the size of the line,
not the hard right margin which should be at 80 (or 132 or configurable)
column. I use lists a lot, and sometimes 3 and more indent levels. If the
right margin would be fixed for all lines, the most inner levels will be
very short as the left column is not starting at 1 but maybe 4x4 or 5x4,
leaving only 60 characters before the line breaks. If each indent has 80
columns, the right margin will be jagged, but on a wide screen, this will
not be a problem. Most of the writing pane in a full screen zim on a wide
screen monitor will be empty anyway and have 200 and more columns available
for this use case.

The text stored in the .txt file should be free-flow without any hard
newlines so this is probably not going to work without a lot of programming
if the gtk widget is not supporting it.

-- 
Svenn