The NetBeans 6.1 editor doesn't seem to like to wrap comments, and the code formatter seems to ignore them. For JavaDoc comments, this behaviour seems inappropriate, as you can end up spending a lot of wasted time manually reflowing paragraphs.
I was wondering if there's some magic setting to get the builtin code formatter, or the editor to wrap/reflow javadoc comments?
I'm fairly sure that you can't do this. Comments are not code and javadoc comments are not exactly plain text either as they're intended to be HTML outputted.
Maybe write your own plugin for this?
This issue has been raised to the Netbeans development team and will likely be added in a "future" release of Netbeans. If you want this feature (or any other feature) to be added to the IDE, go to the issue tracking website and vote for this feature.
http://www.netbeans.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=11553
Most open-source products use the votes on their issue tracking systems to determine where to allocate resources for the next release.