Soft wrap意思

"Soft wrap" is a term used in text editing and word processing to describe a feature that automatically adjusts the line breaks in text to fit the width of the window or area in which the text is displayed or edited, without adding hard returns (line breaks) to the text itself.

When soft wrap is enabled, long lines of text will be "wrapped" so that they do not exceed the width of the text area. This allows the user to easily read and edit the text without having to scroll horizontally. The wrapping is done by inserting invisible soft returns (also known as soft hyphens or non-breaking spaces) at the end of each line, which cause the text to wrap when the line is full.

When the text is printed or pasted into another application, the soft returns are usually ignored, and the text will appear as a single continuous line, without any additional line breaks.

In contrast, "hard wrap" or "hard line break" refers to the insertion of a visible line break character (a hard return) at the end of each line. When hard wrap is used, the text is formatted to have a fixed number of characters per line, and the line breaks are preserved when the text is printed or copied to another application.