
To make the typing of input easier, Yodl allows you to end a line with a
backslash character \ and to continue it on the next line. That way you can
split long lines to fit your screen. When processing its input, Yodl will treat
these lines as one long line, and will of course ignore the \ character. This
feature only works when the \ character is the last one on the line (no spaces
may follow).

When the line bf(following) the one with the \ character has leading spaces,
then these are omitted. This allows you to `indent' a file as you wish, while
the space characters of the indentation are ignored by the tt(yodl) program. 

A trivial example is the following:

verb(\
Grampa and\ 
    grandma are sitting on the sofa.)
    
Due to the occurrence of the \ character in the sequence tt(and\), Yodl will
combine the lines into

verb(Grampa andgrandma are sitting on the sofa.)

Note that the spaces before tt(grandma) are ignored, since this is the second
line following a \ character.

If you bf(do) want one or more spaces while joining lines with \, put the
spaces bf(before) the \ character.

Summarized:

itemize(
    
    it() A Line that ends in a backslash character is merged with the 
    following line. 
    
    it() This only occurs if the \ character is the bf(last) character of the 
    line, no spaces may occur after the character.
    
    it() When merging lines, Yodl ignores leading spaces of the second line.
    
)

The question is of course, how do you accomplish that a line really ends with
a \, when you do bf(not) want Yodl to merge it with the following line? In such
a case, type a space character following your \: Yodl won't combine the lines.
Or set the \ character as tt(CHAR(C)HAR(\)) or tt(CHAR(C)HAR(92)) (see section 
ref(char) for the tt(CHAR) macro). In my opinion, the ease of line 
continuation in Yodl files outweighs the extra necessary actions to typeset a 
real \ character at the end of a line. 
