Verbatim Block Line Wrapping

The default Asciidoctor stylesheet wraps long lines in verbatim blocks by applying the CSS white-space: pre-wrap and word-wrap: break-word. The lines are wrapped at word boundaries, similar to how most text editors wrap lines. This prevents horizontal scrolling which some users considered a greater readability problem than line wrapping.

However, this behavior is configurable because there are times when you don’t want the lines in listing and literal blocks to wrap.

Prevent line wrapping

There are two ways to prevent lines from wrapping so that horizontal scrolling is used instead:

nowrap block option
unset the prewrap document attribute (on by default)

You can use the nowrap option on literal or listing blocks to prevent lines from being wrapped in the HTML.

Example 1. Listing block with nowrap option syntax

[%nowrap,java]
----
public class ApplicationConfigurationProvider extends HttpConfigurationProvider
{
   @Override
   public Configuration getConfiguration(ServletContext context)
   {
      return ConfigurationBuilder.begin()
               .addRule()
               .when(Direction.isInbound().and(Path.matches("/{path}")))
               .perform(Log.message(Level.INFO, "Client requested path: {path}"))
               .where("path").matches(".*");
   }
}
----

When the nowrap option is used, the nowrap class is added to the <pre> element. This class changes the CSS to white-space: pre and word-wrap: normal.

Example 2. Result: Listing block with nowrap option applied

public class ApplicationConfigurationProvider extends HttpConfigurationProvider
{
   @Override
   public Configuration getConfiguration(ServletContext context)
   {
      return ConfigurationBuilder.begin()
               .addRule()
               .when(Direction.isInbound().and(Path.matches("/{path}")))
               .perform(Log.message(Level.INFO, "Client requested path: {path}"))
               .where("path").matches(".*");
   }
}

To prevent lines from wrapping globally, unset the prewrap attribute on the document.

Example 3. Disable prewrap globally (thus, enabling nowrap)

:prewrap!:

When the prewrap attribute is unset, the nowrap class is added to any <pre> elements.

Now, you can use the line wrapping strategy that works best for you and your readers.