[Pan-users] Re: Problems with long lines in posts

[Duncan]

Maurice Batey <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Thu, 15
Jan 2009 15:43:55 +0000:

> On Wed, 14 Jan 2009 19:30:57 +0000, Bruce Bowler wrote:
> 
>> View >> Body Pane >> Wrap Article Body??
> 
> Yes, that works fine, but it wraps at [a] line length of 74,
> rather than window width.
> 
> Not a problem, but I'm curious how the 74 is arrived at.
> 
> (Or have I missed another option somewhere?)

The 74-char limit has to do with the long tradition of 80-char terminal 
widths, going back to 80-char IBM format Hollerith/punch cards.  In fact, 
the "raw format" header portions of the message format used by NNTP are 
still 80-chars (due to incorporation by reference of the SMTP RFC), 
including terminating CRLF (the carriage-return/line-feed control 
character sequence that terminates Internet message format, and DOS 
format, lines, *ix uses only LF, pre-OSX Mac used only CR, BTW) sequence 
so 78 chars plus CRLF, tho body lines may be much longer (1000 or 1024 
including terminating CRLF, IDR which), tho the recommendation is body 
lines too SHOULD not exceed 80 chars (and MUST not, in the later MIME 
format raw line format updates).

What happened is that the 80 char card format became the default fixed-
resolution display terminal width as well, so 80 chars was the point at 
which lines got chopped or wrapped there.

The 74-char, also commonly 72 in some apps, allowed several layers of ">" 
mark quoting before hitting the 78-80 char (again depending on whether 
CRLF was included in the count or not) hard-wrap limit, thus avoiding 
"the jaggies" one still occasionally sees when say 100-char lines are 
wrapped to say 72 chars and 25 chars (the next word was too long to fit 
in the 100 char original line length), 68 chars (due to wrapping at a 
space) and 30 chars, etc.

I haven't looked at the GNKSA in awhile, but it's also likely it has 
something to say about 80-char line lengths, and Charles rightfully 
taking such pride in pan's 100% GNKSA compliance, if it says it should be 
that way, you can bet pan will keep it that way, at least as long as 
Charles remains involved!

Still, I think it'd be nice to have that be an option, with 72 or 74 
being the default.  But pan is a GNOME family app even if it only 
requires GTK++, and neither GNOME nor Charles like such "needlessly 
complex" config options, so it's doubtful it'd ever appear in the GUI, 
even if there was an option added to the preferences.xml config file for 
it at some point.  That'd be in keeping with several other options (such 
as cache size) that can only be changed from the default (or where the 
GUI has fewer options) with direct config file edits.  Another example of 
that is the connections per server option, limited in the GUI to 4 due to 
GNKSA, but settable to any positive integer if set directly in 
servers.xml.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman