ietf-822
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Re: text/enriched: Throwing in the towel

1993-09-07 03:34:17
Steve is right, as are those who've pointed out to me privately than an
explicit <flushboth> would be handy for including excerpts from other
messages.

The current version of the justification prose follows....

Fill/Justification Commands

Initially, text/enriched text is intended to be displayed fully filled
with appropriate kerning and letter-tracking as suits the capabilities
of the receiving user agent software.  Actual line width is left to the
discretion of the receiver, which is expected to fold lines
intelligently (preferring soft line breaks) to the best of its ability.  

The following commands alter that state.  Each of these commands force a
line break before and after the formatting command if there is not
otherwise a line break.  For example, if one of these commands occurs
anywhere other than the beginning of a line of text as presented, a new
line is begun.

    Center -- causes the affected text to be centered.  
    FlushLeft -- causes the affected text to be left-justified with
        a ragged right margin.  
    FlushRight -- causes the affected text to be right-justified
        with a ragged left margin. 
    FlushBoth -- causes the affected text to be filled and padded so
        as to create smooth left and right margins, i.e., to be fully
        justified.
        Nofill -- causes the affected text to be displayed without
        filling or justification.

The center, flushleft, flushright, flushboth, and nofill commands are
mutually exclusive, and, when nested, the inner command takes
precedence.  

Whether or not text is justified by default (that is, whether the
default environment is flushleft or flushboth) is unspecified, and
depends on the capabilities of the local software and hardware and the
tastes of the implementors.  On systems where justification is
considered undesirable, the flushboth environment may be identical to
the flushleft environment (or flushright for right-to-left languages). 
However, justification should not be performed inside of center,
flushleft, flushright, or nofill environments.  Note also that for some
non-ASCII character sets, full justification may be fundamentally
inappropriate.