ietf-822
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: MTAs and Content-Transfer-Encoding conversions

1993-08-25 06:17:43
Steve,

    ---- Included message:

    The biggest problem I have with "pleasantly" formatting quoted-printable is
    the absolute 76-character line limit.  There's just no way to pleasantly

This is certainly an issue to be attended to.  The entire concept of
Content Transfer Encoding is to take a thing that has already been prepared
for consumption by a recipient and then to apply a transform.  As with
all tranformation process (e.g., all gateways) there's going to be some
pain, such as information loss or format ugliness.  I guess we're lucky
in this case.  We don't lose core information, just format.

The CTE Style Guide needs to take this issue into account.  Explicitly
and thoroughly.  Whatever recommendation it makes is certain to have
deficiencies.  It will be trying to make do with a situation that is
highly un-perfect.

    How does one pleasantly format mail consisting largely of 76+ character
    lines using quoted-printable?   Is wrapping it at 38 the way to go?

This is a human factors question.  What is the best way to break lines
that are too long for the physical margin?  One well-known point that
was mentioned in a response to you was to make sure that the break is
at a word bounday.  My own guess is that one does NOT want the rule to
be to break at the half-way mark, but rather to break as close to the
right margin as you can get.  If the remainder is substantially less than
a line long, you probably want it right-shifted some amount, perhaps
STARTING at column 38 (or whatever).

But I repeat, this is a human factors question and the questions should
be answered according to whatever works best for reader comprehension.

d/