[MacPerl-Scribes] formatting suggestion

[Rich Morin <rdm@cfcl.com>]

Several years ago,
a friend of mine introduced me
to the idea of breaking up text
at sentence and even phrase boundaries.
Phrase division can be carried too far, of course,
so I use a slightly relaxed style,
as demonstrated here.

It helps a bit to consider
that punctuation started out
as "breathing instructions for the speaker".
If you read the text aloud,
listening for pauses and/or logical units,
it becomes fairly clear where line breaks should go.

This technique, in any case, has several advantages.
It makes the intended structure very obvious,
allows pieces to be moved around easily,
and (when formatted) gives a totally new view
which allows even "snow-blind" readers
to spot errors.

I have found this technique very useful
and employ it in all of my "markup-based" editing,
including HTML, TeX, troff, etc.
I recommend it to the members of this list
as a way to ease the pain of editing each other's text.

Here is one of Brian's paragraphs,
both in its original form
and edited into something I might have produced:

Back in issue #7, Vicki Brown wrote about her &quot;<a
href="http://www.perlmonth.com/columns/mac_perl/mac_perl.html?issue=7">MacPe
rl Development Environment</a>&quot;.  For the most part, what she
describes there is a typical setup for a serious MacPerler.  In her article
Vicki covered, among other things, BBEdit, from <a
href="http://www.barebones.com/">Bare Bones Software</a>.  As of version
5.1, BBEdit has MacPerl support built in.  Older versions used a plug-in
module for roughly the same functionality.  However having built-in support
means MORE than just the ability to use BBEdit as a text-editor and front
end for MacPerl.
---
Back in issue #7,
Vicki Brown wrote about her &quot;<a
href="http://www.perlmonth.com/columns/mac_perl/mac_perl.html?issue=7"
>MacPerl Development Environment</a>&quot;.
For the most part,
what she describes there is a typical setup
for a serious MacPerler.
In her article  Vicki covered, among other things, BBEdit,
from <a href="http://www.barebones.com/">Bare Bones Software</a>.
As of version 5.1,
BBEdit has MacPerl support built in.
Older versions used a plug-in module
for roughly the same functionality.
However having built-in support
means MORE than just the ability to use BBEdit
as a text-editor and front end for MacPerl.
--
Rich Morin:          rdm@cfcl.com, +1 650-873-7841, http://www.ptf.com/~rdm
Prime Time Freeware: info@ptf.com, +1 408-433-9662, http://www.ptf.com
MacPerl: http://www.macperl.com,       http://www.ptf.com/ptf/products/MPPE
MkLinux: http://www.mklinux.apple.com, http://www.ptf.com/ptf/products/MKLP

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