I Bypassed Adobe and Microsoft to Build a Git-Tracked Book Production Pipeline

Re:I Bypassed Adobe and Microsoft to Build a Git-Tracked Boo... by BrenBarn on Tuesday May 26, 2026 @03:28PM (#48284766)

The annoyances of using "soft wraps" with various kinds of tools is one of the maddening irritations of our software landscape. Inserting non-semantic newlines in content just to make things fit the screen is insane.

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Re:I Bypassed Adobe and Microsoft to Build a Git-Tracked Boo... by skydhash on Tuesday May 26, 2026 @05:21PM (#48286134)

I think most authoring formats require a blank line to mark a paragraph. In emacs and in vim. You can easily reflow such block (and on unix there’s the fmt command).

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Re:I Bypassed Adobe and Microsoft to Build a Git-Tracked Boo... by somat on Tuesday May 26, 2026 @11:43PM (#48289344)

It is not just to fit the screen, it also fits our line orientated version control better.

I don't know if this is suitable for large works(books), but for technical documentation I have my plain text source with one line per sentence, actually I go further than than and usually have one line per punctuation. The raw source reads a little hard but the version control diffs are much cleaner and editing is is easier. Most formats(html, troff, tex) ignore manual line returns anyway.

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Re:I Bypassed Adobe and Microsoft to Build a Git-Tracked Boo... by BrenBarn on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @09:10PM (#48302990)

That's just another form of warping the file to fit the tools. The tools should be built to handle files that are structured in the way that is semantically most natural.

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