Question

I don’t often reformat text, apart from the plain gq so this is probably something simple, but just don’t seem to have the luck of finding it in the help.

Anyways, I have the text that looks like this

Funnily enough, that was exciting. 
"I've just about had enough of this," said a voice beside him. 
He looked up. A girl had come down the other path. Her face was red with exertion under the pale make-up, her hair hung over her eyes in ridiculous ringlets, and she wore a dress which, while clearly made for her size, was designed for someone who was ten years younger and keen on lace edging. 
She was quite attractive, although this fact was not immediately apparent. 
"And you know what they say when you complain?" she demanded. This was not really addressed to Victor. He was just a convenient pair of ears. 

And that’s a pain to read in Vim. So I tried to reformat it with gq and that gives me this

Funnily enough, that was exciting.  "I've just about had enough of this,"
said a voice beside him.  He looked up. A girl had come down the other path.
Her face was red with exertion under the pale make-up, her hair hung over
her eyes in ridiculous ringlets, and she wore a dress which, while clearly
made for her size, was designed for someone who was ten years younger and
keen on lace edging.  She was quite attractive, although this fact was not
immediately apparent.  "And you know what they say when you complain?" she
demanded. This was not really addressed to Victor. He was just a convenient
pair of ears. 

which is rather useless, since the original line endings have special meaning in this case. What I’m trying to accomplish is this

Funnily enough, that was exciting. 
"I've just about had enough of this," said a voice beside him. 
He looked up. A girl had come down the other path. Her face was red with
exertion under the pale make-up, her hair hung over her eyes in ridiculous
ringlets, and she wore a dress which, while clearly made for her size, was
designed for someone who was ten years younger and keen on lace edging. 
She was quite attractive, although this fact was not immediately apparent. 
"And you know what they say when you complain?" she demanded. This was not
really addressed to Victor. He was just a convenient pair of ears. 

i.e. to keep the original line endings, but to “break” every line longer than textwidth into several lines. So it fits the predefined column width limits.

Anyone have any ideas on how to do that? It is a rather large-ish document, and I need some way of handling it in one piece.

Answer 1

A primitive way, but in general managed to do it with

tw=80
qa (recording a macro)
  Vgq
q (stop recording)

nmap <C-p> :execute "normal! @a"<cr>

and by holding <C-p> for quite a while. Not the most elegant of solutions but worked.