separate sentences onto individual lines

[poldrack]

would be useful to separate sentences to individual lines for purposes of diffing

[poldrack]

this is a bad idea for markdown

[dankessler]

I know this is closed, but I'm curious why "one sentence per line" is a bad idea for markdown. This is the approach I take with LaTeX and markdown documents (precisely for diffing and better version control), but I wonder if there's some precipice that I'm unknowingly approaching (at least in markdown) by doing this.

As far as I know, separating sentences on individual lines should be safe in markdown, but I did a bit of googling around to see if there was something obvious I was missing. I came across this site, which seems dedicated to advocating for "semantic line breaks" and it lists Markdown as a language which supports semantic line breaks. I reviewed the Markdown syntax guide, and its treatment of paragraphs and line breaks suggests to me that things will only get messy if you end a line with two or more spaces, in which case it will be treated like a line break; otherwise consecutive lines of text will be rendered like a paragraph, no matter how many lines the content spans. However, experiments in this "issues" editor suggest that github flavored markdown is a bit more aggressive, and preserves all the line breaks, and perhaps whatever you're using to render the book is behaving more like this.

If you change your mind, I use this approach in emacs to do semi-automated conversion of documents, typically when I've inherited them from someone else.

[poldrack]

I said that it's a "bad idea" because the bookdown/pandoc workflow resulted in broken paragraphs (at least in the latex version) when I did this - thanks for the further context on what might have caused this. my guess is that it was due to spaces at the end of my lines, but at this point it's just not worth the effort to back and fix it.

…

On Wed, Nov 21, 2018 at 3:14 PM Dan Kessler ***@***.***> wrote: I know this is closed, but I'm curious why "one sentence per line" is a bad idea for markdown. This is the approach I take with LaTeX and markdown documents (precisely for diffing and better version control), but I wonder if there's some precipice that I'm unknowingly approaching (at least in markdown) by doing this. As far as I know, separating sentences on individual lines should be safe in markdown, but I did a bit of googling around to see if there was something obvious I was missing. I came across this site <http://sembr.org/>, which seems dedicated to advocating for "semantic line breaks" and it lists Markdown as a language which supports semantic line breaks. I reviewed the Markdown syntax guide, and its treatment of paragraphs and line breaks <https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#p> suggests to me that things will only get messy if you end a line with two or more spaces, in which case it will be treated like a line break; otherwise consecutive lines of text will be rendered like a paragraph, no matter how many lines the content spans. However, experiments in this "issues" editor suggest that github flavored markdown is a bit more aggressive, and preserves *all* the line breaks, and perhaps whatever you're using to render the book is behaving more like this. If you change your mind, I use this approach <http://www.cs.au.dk/~abizjak/emacs/2016/03/06/latex-fill-paragraph.html> in emacs to do semi-automated conversion of documents, typically when I've inherited them from someone else. — You are receiving this because you modified the open/close state. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#6 (comment)>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AA1KkLEF50pP0mdsZ_Z_8FKvxajBthIfks5uxd5WgaJpZM4XECrn> .

-- Russell A. Poldrack Albert Ray Lang Professor of Psychology Professor (by courtesy) of Computer Science Bldg. 420, Jordan Hall Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305 poldrack@stanford.edu http://www.poldracklab.org/