Re: Format=flowed and Gnus (was: Multilevel colouring of quoted text...)

[Per Abrahamsen]

planb@newsreaders.com (J.B. Moreno) writes:

> Per Abrahamsen <abraham@dina.kvl.dk> wrote:
> 
> > There is maniac.el which does this, but it is just sick.
> 
> Then someone should fix it, IMNSHO, this is a basic editor feature, I
> wouldn't use an editor for anything but programming that didn't flow
> text.

maniac.el uses hard linebreaks.  It continually reformats the text
while you edit it.  This is a text editing feature, auto-fill-mode on
steroids.

> > That'd be gnu.emacs.bug, but a real flowed text display mode is needed
> > anyway to support the common text format on Win32 and MacOS.
>
> I'd say it's needed everywhere, and not just under Win32 or MacOS.

Above I speak of a display feature, basically wrapping long lines at
word boundaries (instead of line boundaries).

Unix text files are traditionally fixed formatted, i.e. long lines
have already been wrapped.  For Unix text files, word wrap display can
easily be confusing.  

Win32 and MacOS tend to use flowed format text files, where paragraphs
are on one long line, and it is up to the text editor to break it at
word boundaries for display.  Using auto-fill-mode or maniac.el would
be entirely wrong for these.

So we need both.  The format=fixed MIME attribute is perfect for
sending Unix text, and the format=flowed attribute is perfect for
sending Win32/MacOS text.  If we want to support composing messages
for format=flowed in Gnus, Emacs must support word wrap display.