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option for "more newlines" / pretty printing / formatting

Open kevinlawler opened this issue 5 years ago • 0 comments

Please add an option (you may even prefer it to be the default) to incorporate more newlines into the output for readability. The text on the left (sdcv) is much less readable than the text on the right (gui software) because sdvc condenses the text currently. This isn't a terminal limitation but an opportunity for more formatting.

There are probably many "attributes" here in a listing, I am not sure which of them are candidates for being separated by newlines. That will require a good editorial eye. Certainly we could offset the separate definitions to make it possible to scan the terminal output. Separating the citations by date is variously done and not done in other software (the OED app for instance) both to good effect: when it can be clearly demarcated by colors and textual style it isn't necessary to break the paragraph of citations into separate lines.

Additional horizontal tabs (or spaces) or terminal color or terminal text styles would all be welcome as well.

The first screenshot is of how it compares to the handling of the DICT format, the second with the STARDICT format (in both cases sdvc uses this STARDICT format). In both cases the terminal version is harder to read because of the formatting.

newlines

stardict

kevinlawler avatar Oct 06 '18 15:10 kevinlawler