Per Hedeland <p...@hedeland.org> posted 200901032331.n03nvihd008...@pluto.hedeland.org, excerpted below, on Sun, 04 Jan 2009 00:31:44 +0100:
> Who is the culprit behind the gratuitous re-formatting above (also > present in Duncan's reply) - gmane? Or Pan?:-) That'd be pan. It /aggressively/ rewraps both new and quoted text unless you have wrap text turned off -- and then it doesn't wrap /at/ /all/, forcing the user to remember to wrap the new text appropriately. Of course, that's a problem not only due to the necessity of remembering to hit return, but because unlike old-pan, the rewrite doesn't have the line and column position in the article editor status bar, so it'd difficult to know when to do the manual wrap. One exception is direct-pasting, which won't be rewrapped unless you start fooling with it, triggering the rewrap. The other big problem, of course, is that the only way to access the wrap text option is to open the article editor, by which point the quote has already been wrapped if one normally has wrap on, as I do. Thus, to post something with a portion of the quote unwrapped, one must either painstakingly delete soft-wraps and insert hard-wraps as appropriate, or hit reply, toggle the wrap text off, cancel the post, hit reply again so the quote isn't rewrapped, add the new text, remembering to manually wrap as necessary, post, then turn wrapping back on for the next post. Oh, and forget trying to unwrap even a single URL, if wrap is turned on. Pan will rewrap it as it wishes -- there's no way to force it not to, without turning off wrap for the rest of the post as well. And the wrapped URL won't work right until the reader selects/copies it, pastes it somewhere and undoes the wrap, then select/copies /that/ into the browser or whatever (if klipper or the like isn't set to popup an open- with dialog when it sees the URL). So what I usually end up doing is writing along until it's time for the URL, put it in, let it wrap, thinking when I'm done (after the rest of what I'm writing is composed and autowrapped) I'll toggle wrap text off and fix it -- then forget to go back and do it, so my long-link gets split in half! >> Oho! Shades of the GPO! Back when I began cataloging books into >>the Library of Congress, and it still printed literally thousands of >>copies of every card, the formatting for the printers at the GPO was >>coded into the spacing. If you got one too many or too few, every copy >>of the card turned into gibberish from there down... >> >> I thank you, SIR, and offer a sweeping bow to your exemplary >>perspicacity. Thanks again! > > Gee, I had to lookup both GPO (Government Printing Office?) and > perspicacity...:-) I didn't care enough to lookup GPO as it was obvious it was some government office of some sort and that's all I needed to know for the sentence to make sense, but perspicacity I looked up! But a job in the LoC... if one doesn't pickup a few such words here or there working that, there's something wrong! =:^) That he worked in the LoC /does/ explain a bit about Beartooth's posts, tho, just like the fact that my dad was a teacher goes some way to explain something about mine. =;^) BTW, Beartooth, here's one I got a chance to use in its proper context for the first time the other day: bikeshedding. There's a fair chance that's come along since you would have been exposed to it in the LoC, and it's from the vernacular of software developers, but you'll probably appreciate the concept once you google it, if necessary. The story behind, and that gave rise to, the term "bikeshedding" makes it incredibly interesting /as/ a word, and "fun" to use, especially when one is the first in a group to accurately spot a discussion where it applies and labels it accordingly, which is what happened to me the other day. -- 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 _______________________________________________ Pan-users mailing list Pan-users@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
