XML Layout in .abw files

"Vexi Reference.abw" 176L, 65382C

65 thousand columns?! I tried editting this in Vim. It was unusable
(part a failing of vim because it sucks performance-wise with such wide
documents) and the document uneditable because there was no way to get
about such a wide document.

But the part where I've found this to be a big pain is in diffs
between .abw documents. I'm currently writing a large document [0] as
part of a team, and we will be using darcs [1] to post patches and
updates. But this is really difficult when .abw's are laid out as they
are. Patches are obscenely large, and can rarely be independent of
eachother because the content is kept on so few lines.

Surely it would be more sensible to reverse the lines:cols ratio by
being more astute with the layout of .abw XML? Is there are particular
reason that it's like it currently is? I'm sure the ability to diff
files is not the only way in which the large-columnar approach causes
difficulties.

[0] http://darcs.vexi.org/charlie/docs/Vexi%20Reference.abw
    (It's not very large yet, but it will be.)
[1] http://abridgegame.org/darcs

-- 
- Charlie
Charles Goodwin <charlie@vexi.org>
Online @ www.charlietech.com