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  • Column width

    From Samuel Christie@21:1/5 to All on Mon Sep 18 14:25:21 2023
    What's your preferred fill width? How many people still view Usenet on
    80-char terminals?

    Using gnus for email/usenet, I've noticed that hard wrapping has
    unfortunate effects when viewed on a mobile client, since they're often
    only 45-50 characters wide, so a 60 char line wraps very poorly.
    (alternating ~45 and ~15 character lines). The apparent solution of
    using HTML to get dynamic wrapping also feels wrong. (Do any usenet
    clients even support HTML or other MIME types?)

    Or is there any way we could 'soft wrap' lines, such that if your client
    is wrapping the lines itself, it doesn't wrap on both the lines that are
    too long *and* the sender's indicated wraps?
    I'm envisioning a compromise between hard-wrapped lines, and the block paragraph model of org-mode/markdown/latex that treats a contiguous
    sequence of lines as a paragraph (need a blank line or a special line
    wrap character to actually force a wrap).

    But unless there's already a solution I'm unaware of it's not likely to
    help, since any new solution would require client support.

    --
    Not really sure why I'm manually adding a signature...
    -shcv

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Marco Moock@21:1/5 to All on Tue Sep 19 14:24:45 2023
    Am 18.09.2023 um 14:25:21 Uhr schrieb Samuel Christie:

    What's your preferred fill width? How many people still view Usenet on 80-char terminals?

    Many still want it not more than 72 chars.
    I doubt that they still use small screens.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From rdh@21:1/5 to All on Tue Sep 19 13:35:27 2023
    Although right now I'm using Thunderbird, I occasionally use slrn in an
    80 char window.

    IMO it should be the clients duty to wrap lines. I know not all clients
    do this, but there's no technical reason, it's just tradition, I guess. Interestingly, Thunderbird automatically wraps lines at the last word
    before 72 characters, but it doesn't seem to actually post as 72
    character lines, instead letting the reader's client determine line
    length.

    Oh, and Thunderbird also supports HTML in posts, but I've only seen one
    person actually use it, and they're fairly obnoxious.

    --
    ~rdh

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Samuel Christie@21:1/5 to rdh on Tue Sep 19 23:02:59 2023
    rdh <rdh@tilde.institute> writes:

    IMO it should be the clients duty to wrap lines. I know not all clients
    do this, but there's no technical reason, it's just tradition, I guess. Interestingly, Thunderbird automatically wraps lines at the last word
    before 72 characters, but it doesn't seem to actually post as 72
    character lines, instead letting the reader's client determine line
    length.

    Interesting. Looking at the source of your message, it *seems* to be
    using hard line wraps at 72 characters (but I could be misreading, and
    my client is still modifying the supposedly raw view). Also interesting
    was that it apparently sets "format=flowed".

    Looking that up brought me to this article:
    https://www.fastmail.com/blog/format-flowed/
    and this RFC:
    https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3676

    The article was from Fastmail about what it is, and why they don't plan
    to implement it. They mention potential issues with reflowing code,
    which makes sense, but looking at the RFC that shouldn't actually be a
    problem.

    The format=flowed solution looks like it should be close to what I was
    looking for as a solution that could support client-side line wrapping
    without looking bad on clients that don't support it, but I haven't
    finished reading it in detail.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Rene Kita@21:1/5 to Samuel Christie on Wed Sep 20 08:12:50 2023
    Samuel Christie <shcv@sdf.org> wrote:

    What's your preferred fill width? How many people still view Usenet on 80-char terminals?

    I still prefer limiting the initial text width to 72 chars.

    I'm reading on 80 chars, but not a real 80-char terminal. I'm in a tmux
    session with two splits which are 80 chars wide.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)