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Re: [Nmh-workers] Line wrapping in mhl

2012-01-25 15:33:45
ken wrote:
So this has bugged me for probably forever.

Putting aside the crappy MIME handling, one of my biggest
annoyances when doing repl on a message is that when lines are
long, they get wrapped poorly.  Basically, right now if they exceed
the column width they are broken at that point.  To me, this sucks.

Fixing this requires some subtle surgery to mhl, which doesn't look
terrible.  But it begs the question ...  what's the right behavior? 
Break at a space?  If so, what should we do about the "next" line? 
I confess to being a bit unsure.  If we have format=flowed, yes,
the decision is easy (mhl doesn't know about that just yet, but it
could).  But it seems right now that modern mail programs assume
that everybody is doing line wrapping and paragraph reflowing, and
I'm wondering if we should just get on board with that.

(It goes without saying that this would be adjustable via a mhl
format setting).

if the quoted text itself contains quoted text with right-margin '>'
(or other) characters, the problem gets even worse.

my text editor has built-in commands to help deal with that, so i get
by (i used it, above), but honestly, i think this sort of problem is
best left to an external tool, which mhl could be configured to
invoke.  for instance, "par" purports to solve this pretty well
already:  http://www.nicemice.net/par .  (i've never tried it, but i
keep the link around in case i need to.)

i'd prefer that mh not try and be (too much of) a text processor.

paul


--Ken


=---------------------
 paul fox, pgf(_at_)foxharp(_dot_)boston(_dot_)ma(_dot_)us (arlington, ma, 
where it's 33.1 degrees)

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