---- Included message:
At 6:17 AM 8/25/93 -0700, Dave Crocker wrote:
>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.
I wonder about that. People are accustomed to reading newspaper columns,
which
are uniform short lines. I know from experience that people bitch a lot
when
they get text that has straggling words.
Good point. Certainly it is better to have "even" margins than to have
things vary. Enforcing that, in this case, could be a challenge, though,
since it would require wrapping ALL lines, independent of whether q-p
had forced them to be too long. Then, there is the matter of HOW MUCH
too long a given line is. Then, there is the matter of folding figures
and making them unreadable.
So, I guess that taking the view that the original formatting be preserved
as much as possible, with q-p side-effects wrapped in a "overflow"
format, is a visually safer path and problem also a much easier algorithm.
If you right-shift it, how does a MIME reader know that all that whitespace
is unintentional? There is QP for "ignore this line break" but not for
"ignore this run of spaces", unless I missed it. I can imagine uses for
such a thing, but it's not there, is it?
Hmmm. mumble...
d/