TextFormatter

TextFormatter is a software component or library designed to arrange and render plain text for display, printing, or export. It focuses on ordering text within a defined width, applying line wrapping, indentation, margins, and various forms of justification to produce readable and consistent output. Depending on the implementation, it may operate on continuous text streams or on discrete blocks such as paragraphs and lists, and it can preserve or normalize whitespace according to configuration.

Core features commonly associated with TextFormatter include adjustable wrap width, support for left, right, center, or full justification, handling of indentation and hanging indents, and the ability to preserve blank lines and paragraph boundaries. Many implementations offer locale-aware wrapping and Unicode support to handle languages with diverse word boundaries. Output may be produced as plain text or transformed into other formats such as HTML or styled markup, and some variants allow the addition of simple styling metadata or annotations without altering the textual content.

Use cases for TextFormatter span console applications, documentation generators, and publishing pipelines where consistent line lengths and alignment are important. Design considerations emphasize performance, especially for large texts; thread-safety in multi-threaded environments; and correct handling of whitespace, hyphenation, and combining characters in diverse languages. Implementations may expose APIs for configuring width, margins, indentation, and alignment, and can be part of broader text rendering or templating frameworks.

See also: word wrapping, text layout, typography, string formatting.