CODEWITHSUNDEEP
emacsfillparagraph
Bill
Bill

Reputation: 571

Emacs fill-paragraph not breaking lines where expected

I have the following HTML code (a list item). The content isn't important--the problem is the end of line 2.

<li>Yes, you can learn how to play piano without becoming a
  great notation reader,
  however, <strong class="warning">you <em class="emphatic">will</em>
  have to acquire a <em class="emphatic">very</em>basic amount
  of notation reading skill</strong>.  But the extremely
  difficult task of honing your note reading skills that
  classical students are required to endure for years and years
  is <em class="emphatic">totally non-existant</em>as a
  requirement for playing non-classical piano.</li>

The command fill-paragraph (M-q) has been applied. I can't for the life of me figure out why a line break is being placed on the second line after "reader," since there's more space available on that line to put "however,". Another weird thing I've noticed is that when I delete and then reapply the tab characters on lines 4 and 5 (starting with "have" and "of" respectively), two space characters are automatically inserted as well, like so:

<li>Yes, you can learn how to play piano without becoming a
  great notation reader,
  however, <strong class="warning">you <em class="emphatic">will</em>
    have to acquire a <em class="emphatic">very</em>basic amount
    of notation reading skill</strong>.  But the extremely
  difficult task of honing your note reading skills that
  classical students are required to endure for years and years
  is <em class="emphatic">totally non-existant</em>as a
  requirement for playing non-classical piano.</li>

I don't know if this is some kind of clue or not. This doesn't happen with any of the other lines.

Is this just a bug, or does any experienced Emacs person know what might be going on here?

Thank you

Upvotes: 4

Views: 525

Answers (2)

DES
DES

Reputation: 330

This is intentional. Lines that start with an XML or SGML tag are paragraph separator lines. If Emacs broke the paragraph in such a way that the tag ended up at the start of a line, subsequent applications of fill-paragraph would stop at that line. This is to ensure that, for instance,

<p>a paragraph</p>
<!-- no blank line -->
<p>another paragraph</p>

does not turn into

<p>a paragraph</p> <!-- no blank line --> <p>another paragraph</p>

For the same reason, Emacs will not break a line after a period unless there are two or more spaces after the period, because it uses a double space to distinguish between a period that ends a sentence and a period that ends an abbreviation, and breaking a line after the period that ends an abbreviation would create an ambiguous situation.

Upvotes: 3

Rene Saarsoo
Rene Saarsoo

Reputation: 13917

Looks like a bug to me.

I was able to trim down your example to something like this:

<li>blabla
  blabla <b>some_long_text_here</b> <b>more_long_text_here</b>

If I remove a single character of text from it, fill-paragraph works as expected. Or if I add a chacter between the two consequtive <b> elements.

Upvotes: 1

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