cscmail-users

[CSCMail-Users] Linebreaks

[Daniel S. <np...@gm...>]

hi

i recently upgraded to 1.7.10 and everything went well, except mails without
any linebreaks in them arent automatically wraped anymore.
any ideas how to fix that?

i'm using cschtml 1.1 (and cscmail tells me it still uses this widget to
display messages (so the update hasnt killed it)) and html mails work fine so i
suppose this has nothing to do with cschtml.

btw: the font has also changed, messages are now displayed with some kind of
standard fixed pitch font (except they are html)

daniel

Re: [CSCMail-Users] Linebreaks

[Count Z. <cou...@cy...>]

Ok, I had been playing with using <PRE> </PRE> around text e-mail to
preserve formatting in a non-hackish manner...

This of course makes the HTML widget us a fixed width font, and tells it not
to autowrap lines...

I removed the <PRE> tags and checked a new csclib.pl into CVS, so that will
fix these problems in the short term... However,
text mail will still not display completely accurately... For example:

    This line is indented with TAB

This line is not...

With <PRE> that displayed correctly, without it, it doesn't... We used to do
hackish things like convert \t to 8 &nbsp; characters, but I really really
don't like that fix...

I'll try to think of something...

Anyway, in the short term, checkout csclib.pl from CVS on sourceforge to
solve the linewrap/fixed font's issue...

-CZ

----- Original Message -----
From: Daniel Schregenberger <np...@gm...>
To: <csc...@li...>
Sent: Wednesday, October 17, 2001 9:58 AM
Subject: [CSCMail-Users] Linebreaks


> hi
>
> i recently upgraded to 1.7.10 and everything went well, except mails
without
> any linebreaks in them arent automatically wraped anymore.
> any ideas how to fix that?
>
> i'm using cschtml 1.1 (and cscmail tells me it still uses this widget to
> display messages (so the update hasnt killed it)) and html mails work fine
so i
> suppose this has nothing to do with cschtml.
>
> btw: the font has also changed, messages are now displayed with some kind
of
> standard fixed pitch font (except they are html)
>
> daniel
>
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>

Re: [CSCMail-Users] Linebreaks

[Daniel S. <np...@gm...>]

Actually this fixed the "problem". The messages look like before and like I'm
used to.

In fact I never noticed the layout wasn't correct (the thing with the TABs)

You're right: converting a \t to 8 spaces is just a hack but I don't care much
about that (I don't think it's important to format emails (at least for me)).
So for me this is alright. But for the long term your right.
I noticed the widget used to edit messages also replaces \t by a number of
spaces. Maybe the source of this one could help for a temporary fix. (just a
suggestion)

btw: I noticed that HTML-Mails not declared as such (which means normal
text-mail with html-content, just like I would write this mail with html) have
not been displayed correctly with the PRE-Tags. This is actually not cscmail's
fault, but the programs who created such mails, but its a hint that this was a
hack.
If you like to I can forward you one such message.

Daniel

PS: thanks! this was really fast!


Count Zero wrote:

> Ok, I had been playing with using <PRE> </PRE> around text e-mail to
> preserve formatting in a non-hackish manner...
> 
> This of course makes the HTML widget us a fixed width font, and tells it not
> to autowrap lines...
> 
> I removed the <PRE> tags and checked a new csclib.pl into CVS, so that will
> fix these problems in the short term... However,
> text mail will still not display completely accurately... For example:
> 
>     This line is indented with TAB
> 
> This line is not...
> 
> With <PRE> that displayed correctly, without it, it doesn't... We used to do
> hackish things like convert \t to 8 &nbsp; characters, but I really really
> don't like that fix...
> 
> I'll try to think of something...
> 
> Anyway, in the short term, checkout csclib.pl from CVS on sourceforge to
> solve the linewrap/fixed font's issue...
> 
> -CZ
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Daniel Schregenberger <np...@gm...>
> To: <csc...@li...>
> Sent: Wednesday, October 17, 2001 9:58 AM
> Subject: [CSCMail-Users] Linebreaks
> 
> 
> > hi
> >
> > i recently upgraded to 1.7.10 and everything went well, except mails
> without
> > any linebreaks in them arent automatically wraped anymore.
> > any ideas how to fix that?
> >
> > i'm using cschtml 1.1 (and cscmail tells me it still uses this widget to
> > display messages (so the update hasnt killed it)) and html mails work fine
> so i
> > suppose this has nothing to do with cschtml.
> >
> > btw: the font has also changed, messages are now displayed with some kind
> of
> > standard fixed pitch font (except they are html)
> >
> > daniel

Re: [CSCMail-Users] Linebreaks

[Steven K. <st...@re...>]

Daniel Schregenberger wrote:
> 
> Actually this fixed the "problem". The messages look like before and like I'm
> used to.
> 
> In fact I never noticed the layout wasn't correct (the thing with the TABs)
> 
> You're right: converting a \t to 8 spaces is just a hack but I don't care much
> about that (I don't think it's important to format emails (at least for me)).
> So for me this is alright. But for the long term your right.
> I noticed the widget used to edit messages also replaces \t by a number of
> spaces. Maybe the source of this one could help for a temporary fix. (just a
> suggestion)

The editing widget is a text widget...  The core of the problem is that
there is no &tab; character in HTML...  HTML was never designed to be a
text layout language.  In other words, it is designed to define "types"
of content, and the display agent is supposed to provide proper
formatting.  For example, the <P> </P> tag pair... A "good" HTML display
agent should indent the first line of the paragraph.  None do... HMTL
specifically ignores whitespace.  This includes \n, \t and even <space>
characters.  For example, like a good typist, I insert TWO spaces after
a sentance.  You can't see that though, because HTML ignores the
whitespace, dropping the 2nd space.  Of course, we have a <P> tag, but
no <SENTANCE> tag.  HTML designers dropped the ball there.  Is it a text
layout language?   NO! they say, user agents control text layout, HTML
simply defines the text types.  That is why they are removing things
like align=center from tags.  Problem is, in the real world, people want
to use HTML as a text formatting language.  They want to specify that
this paragraph should be centered, and not leave that up to the user
agent.  It's a mess, but anyway, I rant too much.

Ideally, I should use a text widget to display text/plain messages, and
an HTML widget to display text/html messages.  However, I think users
like the "pseudo" HTML formatting that using an HTML widget for
everything provides (things like auto-hyperlinks)

> btw: I noticed that HTML-Mails not declared as such (which means normal
> text-mail with html-content, just like I would write this mail with html) have
> not been displayed correctly with the PRE-Tags. This is actually not cscmail's
> fault, but the programs who created such mails, but its a hint that this was a
> hack.
> If you like to I can forward you one such message.

Yeah, this is one area where I have been "strict" .. If a message is
"text/plain" then I treat it as such... This is a "good thing" in my
mind... That way, I can send you text email that contains code snippets
or HTMl examples (eg: "the use of <P align="center"> is depreciated)
without it getting munged into some sort of HTML mess...

(If your MTA is displaying all this text centered, it's time to switch
to CSCMail <grin>)

If an MTA is sending out "true" HTML mail that has it's MIME type set to
text/plain, it's broken, and there's nothing I can do about it... If you
want to email someone a "hyperlink" just send them the URL... all modern
MTA's (including CSCMail) will automagically turn URLs in text/plain
messages into hyperlinks...  CSCMail is stricter than say Outlook
Express, in that it requires a real URL (http://cscmail.net) and won't
attempt to turn www.cscmail.net into a hyperlink (that's not a URL,
there is no protocol specifier)  Outlook, and all MS product's as far as
I can tell, do the "wrong thing" and attempt to turn anything that
"looks like" a url into a hyperlink.  Of course, they miss a lot of
things, and turn the wrong things into links a lot of the time, so it's
a mess I avoid by only autohyperlinking true URLs.

Herm, soapbox mode off....

-CZ