[issue12485] Improvement of textwrap module

[Tyler Romeo]

New submission from Tyler Romeo <tylerromeo at gmail.com>:

Python's textwrap module can be helpful at times, but personally I think there are a couple of things that could be added.

First, when it comes to text wrapping, usually you're not dealing with a monospace font where each letter is the same size. If you're working with the Python Imaging Library for example, there is a function that you pass the text to in order to determine how wide (or tall) a font is. Therefore, it would be useful to have a parameter where the user can pass a function that gives a custom width for a set of text. The default for this parameter, of course, would be len.

Also, this module uses a rough and efficient algorithm for wrapping text, but the results are not always aesthetically pleasing (one word hanging off on a line). Sometimes the user may want something that is wrapped more beautifully, so to say, such as is found in TeX. So there should also be a beautiful option that goes back and redistributes the text so that it is more aesthetically pleasing.

This isn't exactly that important (minor improvements to a module that is probably not used much), but I figured I'd get it out there as I run into the problem all the time when trying to wrap text to be put in images of a set size.

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components: Extension Modules
files: textwrap.py-improvement.diff
keywords: patch
messages: 139731
nosy: parent5446
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: Improvement of textwrap module
type: feature request
versions: Python 2.7
Added file: http://bugs.python.org/file22561/textwrap.py-improvement.diff

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