My (Correct) Opinions on Hard Line-Wrapping

Let’s begin by pinning down what hard line wrapping really is:

• If a text includes new-line characters (the character you type when hitting the return key) to wrap long lines, the text uses hard line wraps.
• If the text only uses new-line characters in the end of paragraphs, i.e. lets long lines flow to the end of the application window, it uses soft line wraps.

An example of a soft-wrapped text

An example of a hard-wrapped text

Before you hard-wrap your tex-file consider the following…

…I might prefer longer lines than you

By hard-wrapping you impose your preferred line width upon me. By avoiding hard-wrapping you allow me to soft-wrap at whatever line-width I want.

…I might have a narrower editor/terminal than you

What if my text editor is a bit narrower than
yours? Your
hard-wrapped lines might end up like this in
my editor. This
quite annoying and definitely harder to read.

…it sometimes prevents navigation by search

If I read a PDF-version of your document and want to jump to the corresponding point in the latex document I want to be able to search for a sequence of words. This will be impossible if the sequence of words has a hard-wrap somewhere in it.

…it might be hard to go back!

As far as I know there is no way of easily going back to “soft-wrap” or “long lines”.