Should I use a large width?

[iampi31415]

Hi!

Thanks for this neat software!

Using width=80 implies a line break that when the number of characters does not match (or nearly match) the terminal width, it looks odd, something like:

It looks like this is your first time starting 
a discussion in this repository!

This is a community we build together. Please 
be welcoming and open minded.

If I use even a very large width possibly larger that the number of characters, so that the text does not have the extra formatting of a line break? Or maybe replace them? What is your suggestion?

[jugglerchris]

Hi,

Thanks for your interest!

Can you be more specific about what you find odd about it? If your terminal is 80 columns wide, then I think wrapping at 80 looks best.
If you're not outputting to a fixed-width terminal (or similar), then a large width might be your best option. Nearly everything should work as expected, except possibly for tables. There are a few options which can adjust the formatting:

• max_wrap_width: With a very large overall width, still wrap blocks of text to this maximum width (perhaps the opposite of what you want, but very wide text can be hard to read too)
• min_wrap_width: Set a minimum text wrap width (default is 3)
• raw_mode: Don't lay out tables nicely, just extract the contents in order.

You can play around with the options with the online demo: https://jugglerchris.github.io/rust-html2text/

If none of the above is quite right, how are you hoping for it look?

[iampi31415]

I've played with the web demo. If I have a terminal whose width is less than the one set by the software, what will happen is that the terminal wraps it, and then it wraps again when reaching 80 characters.

This means one ends up with a "ladder-like" text shown to the user.

I was wondering what to do, so using a very large width would let the terminal handle it, I think.

What do you think? Indeed, maybe some terminals would scroll forever horizontally, I don't know whether that is a common setting (not mine.)

Besides, everything is working well :-).

PS: It would be odd for tables maybe, yes, but I would rarely have one.

[jugglerchris]

Ideally you should set the width to the same as your terminal. That's ideal if the output is generated from inside the terminal, so it can check the width to pass it in.

If you're generating the text separately and viewing it in a terminal of unknown width later on, then yes I think a very large width would be the best option. The only thing I'm not sure about is that tables (which inherently have a width as they have columns except with raw mode), which might not work so well.