On Tue, 28 Feb 2012 14:51:31 -0800, Edward Jaffe wrote: >On 2/28/2012 8:51 AM, McKown, John wrote: >> IOW, damned if I do and damned if I don't (insert hard line breaks, that is). > >My advice is not to ever insert any hard breaks. That just makes things worse. >When one relies on software that properly handles format=flowed everything >should work beautifully. Thunderbird seems to support this very well. I assume >Outlook does as well. > I'll take the contrary position.
This ain't a word processor. I learned long ago to insert line breaks where I want them -- it's the big key to the right of the home row. Using this and presuming a monospaced font (terminals used to be that way; 3270s still are) I can enter tabular information using the space bar (the long key near my belly button), and even compose rudimentary graphics. for anything fancier, people should use a markup language (but which one? HTML? RTF? Other (specify)?) F=F is an abominable compromise. Q-P is no better. Both are attempts at stealth markup -- structured text that appears plain The games they play are never quite transparent. They corrupt plain text that I paste in. MS Exchange used to take JCL snippets that supplied and interpret such as "BLKSIZE=6144" as Q-P entities. (It was breaking the rules; Q-P was not declared in the MIME headers, but MS was governed by a principle of fewest phone calls, and more people would complain about seeing "=3D" in their emails because the sender omitted them, or they had configured LISTSERV to strip MIME headers, than about seeing "BLKSIZE=6144" become "BLKSIZEa44") When I paste in a snippet of a Rexx trace which flags its lines with ">>" on the left, my MUA, or perhaps yours, tries to interpret them as quotation flags. And F=F's attempt to reposition ">" to fit the screen width makes things even worse. I believe F=F uses <SPACE><NEWLINE> as a continuation indicator. Woe betide anyone who allows a space to occur before a hard line break. Perhaps this is the source of R.S.'s problem. Leave my text alone, dammit! -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
