Re: wrapping behavior

Vladimir> I noticed that Mozilla flows monospaced text perfectly Vladimir> in its message composition window. It does the same thing to patches. No, thanks. Vladimir> The problem is that the world is moving away from Vladimir> monospaced text editors and toward multi-font, Vladimir> proportionally spaced text with embedded graphics, etc. Good for the world. But so what? I don't object to the use of "multimedia", even in the simple form of a proper italic face for emphasis, instead of /slashes/ or _underscores_. Of course, I don't see either of those in email, because Gnus washes them into italics automatically. Graphics are good, so are audio and video clips. But what I've experienced so far suggests that the text:format ratio is the single best indicator, after author identity, of whether I want to pay attention or not. It doesn't have to be that way, but sadly enough, it is. Vladimir> I find it painful to read and answer an HTML-formatted Vladimir> email message with XEmacs+MH-E. So use Gnus or VM to read it as HTML. If you want mh-e to wash your HTML mail into something good-looking, talk to the mh-e people. It's not an XEmacs problem. Nor is message composition. Vladimir> XEmacs and TeX are similar in that part of their Vladimir> internal models are obsolete. How can they be obsolete? They're exactly what I want. ;-) Vladimir> Why should we read monospaced text? So change the default font, already. Vladimir> Isn't that just a holdover from ASR-33 teletype Vladimir> machines, just like 80x24 is? No. As far as I'm concerned, there's no such thing as "monospaced text." Text is a stream of characters. How you choose to format and display that may be monospaced or proportional, bidirectional or vertical. If you don't want text presented in a monospaced face, don't have it presented that way. Set your default face to use font Times Roman or Helvetica. A lot of people do exactly that for their mail and news buffers. Although I think text/plain in Times looks pretty good, I don't use that option. The mail and news that's important to me often contains code or patches; it's useful for that to be monospaced. Vladimir> We don't use monospaced type when we set books, and the Vladimir> typography of Don Knuth's code (not the literate Vladimir> programming stuff, just the code) in his book MMIXware Vladimir> is pleasantly readable. Books are rather hard to run grep(1) on though, aren't they? That evidently doesn't matter to you. It's extremely important to me. Vladimir> Why should my choice of width and margins be your choice Vladimir> of width and margins? Because nobody implements RFC 2646, which would make both of us happy. In particular, my precious patches would not get wrapped, while your text (including quoted lines in messages) could be flowed if you chose to display it that way. Vladimir> P.S. It's Notepad, not Memopad. In Japanese, it's Memopad. -- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.