On 2025-03-06 at 00:32, James Lu wrote: > Hi all, > > On 2025-02-26 10:21, Soren Stoutner wrote:
>> However, from a technical perspective, having the *sending* program >> decide where line breaks should be in an email doesn’t seem like >> the correct approach to me because, 1) the sending program does not >> know the screen width of the receiving program, and 2) there is >> large variability in the screen width of receiving devices, >> including cell phones who are often less than 80 characters wide. > > There's plenty of discussion about format=flowed elsewhere in this > thread, but unfortunately it never caught on. This got me thinking > though: why do email clients *have* to show hard-wrapped text as-is? > If I were to write, say, a Thunderbird extension that forcibly > unwraps text I receive, regardless of whether format=flowed was > specified, what would be the implication? At my workplace, I am obliged to use Outlook. By default, Outlook seems to do exactly that, on the recipient and viewing side: it leaves the actual representation on-disk etc. alone, but if it sees consecutive non-blank lines (I'm guessing the criterion is actually "has something other than whitespace at the start of the line"), it will fold those lines together into a single line (with the division point represented by, as far as I can see, a single space) at rendering time. There seems to be nothing you can do, as the sender, to affect this behavior for the recipient - not short of using *double* newlines, turning each "line" into its own paragraph. There seem to be some special rules relating to punctuation (if the previous line ends with a period, the next one won't be folded into the same line; if the new line begins with a '>', the two lines won't be folded together; I've also seen cases where the new line begins with a single word followed by a period and a close-paren get the new line not folded in to the previous), but I don't have a full handle on those, and the 100-foot view of the behavior remains the same. This sometimes makes no difference, and sometimes drives me *batty*, especially given how much effort I put in to manually adding those hard-line-breaks in all the mails I have to compose in Outlook (since it won't add them itself). There *is* a setting which can disable this behavior; I don't remember what it is, except that it might be (or be a subset of) the "read E-mail as plain text" setting which they designate as being a security option. That setting is per-client, however. ...which has the effect that the same person can see the same mail rendered differently when reading it on different devices. I personally find that to be a negative, but others may well find it to be a positive. -- The Wanderer The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
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