[Gretl-devel] function package help text

Hello function-package writers, I've noticed recently that while the help text for some function packages looks fine, the help for some others looks like sh*t in what I regard as a reasonably wide help window. This seems to stem from some package writers resizing the help editing window to some "excessive" width -- so that people viewing the help in a narrower window see lots of (seemingly) arbitrarily broken lines. Some of you may have noticed that in CVS of a few weeks ago I placed a limit of 78 characters per line on package help text. Ignacio certainly noticed this, and pointed out that it was difficult to comply with the new restriction since the help text area in the function package window didn't give the user any idea of how wide the lines were, so one might have to go back and forth a number of times before managing to comply with the new limit. [Before proceeding, let me point out that there are good reasons for a line-length limit: see, for example, http://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability ] I accept Ignacio's point, so in current git there's a new mechanism in place. To edit a package's plain-text help you now click the Edit button (lined up with "Help") in the package editor dialog. This gives you a text editor window which has the usual and expected text-editing controls (copy, paste, undo, redo, which were not available previously), and which has a fixed maximum width (which should roughly correspond to 78 characters). So (hopefully) now if you create excessively long lines you'll see the same broken mess that others will see when they try to read your help text in a text window 78 characters wide! Please, I don't mean for this to be adversarial (even if I phrased it a little sharply). We definitely value contributed function packages. We just want your work to be as easily usable as possible for as many gretl users as possible, and that requires that the help text be properly legible in a window of moderate width. Allin