Re: Paragraphs (and sentences) in Emacs cannot span pages.

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hi, Richard!

On Wed, 7 Sep 2005, Richard M. Stallman wrote:

>    In printed material, sentences and paragraphs can (and frequently
>    do) start on one page and finish on the next.

>That's because the pages are broken automatically.
>That's not how people normally use ^L in files they edit.

>Could you tell me more about the files you are editing
>and why they have ^L in the middle of paragraphs?

I haven't had any trouble with any actual file.

It was more a philosophical thing that occurred to me whilst documenting
pages, paragraphs and sentences in @node Standard Regexps in
searching.texi.  I was wondering about the motivation for having
paragraphs and sentences constrained to be within single pages.

This is surely something which _can't_ be changed now.  If the defaults
of paragraph-s\(tart\|eparate\) were changed to allow paragraphs to span
pages, then lots of little things would stop working.

But this is one way in which Emacs's pages/paragraphs/sentences don't
correspond with what people might expect, and I think I should write a
bit about it into the documentation, also telling hackers how to set
things up to have paragraphs spanning page breaks.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Munich, Germany)