Ability to reformat text?

[ntolia]

I just might be missing something obvious but is there a way to reformat text to wrap it to some appropriate length? I currently have to do that manually as our build system uses doc8 to lint and has line length restrictions enabled.

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[lextm]

No linter or formatter yet.

[acsr]

Important note on line length linters: Limiting line length in prose text and documentation is not a smart idea. If you are just writing plain docs by hand (for Sphinx!) simply ignore these limits and switch your editor to word wrap instead.

It is much better to write one sentence or semantic block per line.

If your documentation or string is inline in your code and exceeds the limits this is a challenge for static code analysers. Here you get the arguments why it is worth to ignore PEP8 here.

If you change prose over time rearranging word wrap in human readable text to match e.g. PEP8 80 chars per line can and will lead to unreadable diffs. and clunky source code.

Another point is that gnu gettext based translation of docs (which you can use excellently with sphinx-intl) leads to cleaner message ids and reuse of standard phrases. It makes the life of translators much easier.

Creating exceptions to make linters ignore i18n message ids ist not the topic of this comment.

Read the excellent article of Brandon Rhodes on Semantic Line Feeds http://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2012/one-sentence-per-line/