oh! so, that's the cause of another problem I faced a while ago. 
When people edited an ELOG page on a narrow screen device (a.k.a smartphone) it put the extra CRLF and made the page look like the attachment below 
(it broke the original formatting).

I had to "fix" this by setting the width of the textarea to a huge number... 

However, removing "wrap=hard" solves both these problems! ;)

Yepp, that's right. But without the "wrap=hard", you could get one single long line which is almost impossible to read. So there is no perfect solution for all cases. I see three options

1) Remove "wrap=hard" and let the user do as the user wants. This can lead to very long lines almost impossible to read.
2) Keep "wrap=hard" and rely on the browser to put in CRLF between lines according to the textarea box during input. The result will then be the same as during editing. Of course this might 
require to make the textarea width wide enough on small screens not to get too many CRLFs. The default "Message width" is 78 chars, but on modern browsers some JavaScript code automatically sets 
the width to equal the screen width which normally is wider.
3) Add artificial CRCL like every 40 or 80 chars. This is the "beautifying" K.O. mentioned and will never be perfect. Not sure if elog should touch the text the user enters.

Looking at the three options, I kind of conclude that 2) would still be the best.

Stefan

How about adding a config option? 
Ideally, it might be nice to have this option "per record" or "per logbook", but "per instance" should be good enough.

I'm sorry for being annoying... 
but I have tried to wrap the <pre> tag in a <div> and it seems to do the trick
(the text is a single line with repeating aaa-b-cc sequence)

In the READ mode, the width is limited by the div's width 
(see the first attachment)

In the EDIT mode, the width is only limited by the textarea width
(see the second attachment)

All this is with "wrap=hard" removed. 

Ok, I added an option

Hard wrap = 0 | 1

with the default being "1", so same behaviour as before. If you set this now to zero, you turn it off.

Now waiting for the first people complaining about the very long lines not being readable...

Best,
Stefan

That's great! Thank you very much. 

Didn't work for me. The text is just truncated after the width and no extra lines are added.

Sorry, I forgot to mention that I also added some styles to the <pre> tag:
style="white-space: normal"
(see the screenshot on my previous post)