Re: [CSCMail-Users] Message Editor and wordwrapping

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

Tim Jackson was overheared mumbling something about this on 22 Jul 2000
22:49:39 BST

<- long word wrap rant snipped ->

The woes in the word wrapping have long been a known issue.  As you note, some
of them are due to flaws in the GtkText widget that we use for editing mail,
and others are due to programming flaws.

First point:

With the GtkText widget, one cannot force a hard wrap at column X.

Thus, we have to do all word wrapping post-send.

This leads to several fairly sticky problems.  I have played with "paragraph"
wrapping, which basically strips all single carriage returns, and wraps each
paragraph.  This illiminates the wierdnes you point out, but has other issues.

One: it illiminates any hope of having a list or table, since it strips single
carriage returns, and only honors paragraph breaks.

Two: it is very hard to take quoting into account.  Despite what you say,
quotes SHOULD get re-wrapped.  If you are on any mailing lists at all, you know
that the lists will re-wrap the mail anyway, to enforce a 76 character line
limit.	(Or at the least, you will get nasty-ograms if you have longer lines) 
So what we really need is a way to detect quoted lines and remove all the quote
characters, then re-wrap the quoted paragraph, and re-insert the quoted
characters.  This gets even more combersome when you factor in nested quotes. 
Feel free to submit a patch that deals with this...

The third issue lies in the "save as draft" functions...  These are a bit of a
hack, (to be honest) and text tends to get mangled by them (as you noticed)

This is because we wrap everything once when you save it as a draft, and then,
when you edit it, you now have hard returns in your paragraphs.  When you go to
add words etc, it gets re-wrapped when you send it...

I would love to solve all of these issues.  They have been brought up in the
past (by one Lane Lester...) but no one was able to help me come up with a good
solution...

Please feel free to debate all this with me on the list here, and together we
(the list members) can come up with a good solution...

I will attempt to get whatever solution we come up with in to 1.8.0 and I for
sure will impliment it in 2.0.0 ...

-Count Zero

-- 
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GIT/CM d--(+) s+: a- C++++ UL++++$ P+++ L+++>++++ E--- W+++(--) N+ o? K?
w---(++) O M->-- !V PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+@ 5? X+ R++ tv-- b+++ DI? D++
G e h r- y+
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------