Re: [Pan-users] underlines etc in pan

[Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom]

> is there any way to make pan show underlines in news like _underline_ or 
> *accentuations*. I am a little bit confused, that pan doesn't do this by 
> default.

are you talking about automatically converting plain text which looks like
'*word*' or '_word_', and underlining or bolding it? or are you talking
about rendering HTML?

I think making 'improvements' like that to a message is a dubious matter at
best because:
a. it's not what the poster originally wrote, and so might obscure what they
mean. 
b. parsing things like that lends extra complexity to pan, which gives more
opportunities for bugs to arise. not to mention, there are probably some
wacky ways to misparse this stuff, which leads to all sorts of formatting
errors.
c. it takes more processing cycles (maybe not much time on a 1GHz machine,
but there are still people on older machines, and just on principle I hate
CPU cycle wasteage).
d. what about copying text? what happens when you copy the 'modified' text?
it's no longer what the poster originally wrote. there's no way to convert
the text back from its 'modified' form, to its original form when it's
copied.
e. I don't see any real benefit to it. 

Carl Soderstrom.
-- 
Systems Administrator
Real-Time Enterprises
www.real-time.com