how can I use vim as a wordprocess with soft wordwrap and columns only 40?

Question

I have been trying to use vim as a wordprocessor to do most of my initial drafting and then open in abiword or open office to do my final printing.

Problem has been, even with :set linebreak and :set wrap, when I open it, there's a ton of line breaks. I have to go and manually remove them.

What I want is to be able to write at 40 columns wrap around softly so that when I open it up in Open Office, it gets restored to whatever that column width is, preserving things like carriage return but without all those linebreaks.

Answer 1

Have you considered feeding your vim-edited text into a plain text processor - this can produce some remarkably good-looking results in PDF RTF or other final form.

If you do this you don't need to worry about line breaks.

Answer 2

for soft-wrapping you need to use :set columns instead of :set textwidth or set wrap (which are for hard-wrapping):

:set columns=40

Answer 3

Use this option in your .vimrc or at runtime:

:set textwidth=40