Hi,
On 6 Aug 2004 at 16:57, Weinger, Jerrold (DSCP) spoke, thus:
[...]
> I work on the Windows platform at home and at work. What is the impact
> of the line wrap issue on me?
For you, no problem will appear, assuming none has so far and your mail
transport (a machine not under your control that is responsible for
delivering mail to you) has not corrupted your mail, and that the same is
true for mail you send, so long as all transports in the process are not
affected. If you use Windows, most programs will automatically wrap text,
since the default mode of text file in Windows is line-per-paragraph.
MSWord can save as text with line breaks, but this is rarely used or
necessary in Windows ; in fact, the paragraph-per-line mode can be
advantageous in certain cases since text can now be reformatted at will to
necessary margins by whomever chooses to read it. Electronic mail is
different, however; not everyone does have wrapping capabilities and is on
Windows where this is assumed, and so the standards have accommodated for
this. Lines only appear where you put them, so it is necessary to put
line breaks at or about the 75th character. As such, your mail will not
look pleasant for someone with a non-wrapping viewer, since only one line
break exists, or two, at the end of one paragraph.
Consider, if you will, the line wrap issue to be two different problems:
1. Your lines are not wrapped, so people viewing them with a non-wrapping
mailer will experience severe difficulties.
2. Your lines are not wrapped so they are very long; some transports,
including mine, will choak and refuse to deliver mail with lines that
long. Sometimes this results merely in line splitting, oftentimes it
results in actual mail corruption where the ends of lines are simply
discarded. The standard is correct and BrailleNote is wrong, and if a
transport adheres to the standard then the BrailleNote must also.
> Suppose that I use my Braillenote to compose and mail an e-mail to the
> Braillenote list. Will the recipients having Braillnotes then see a
> jumbled, garbled message from me on the Braille display, or on embossed
> Braille? Will the recipients using PCs see a jumbled, garbled message from
> me, on the Braille display, or on embossed Braille, or on printed output?
Once again, this depends on circumstances. The list transport may not
have a problem, though I have noticed mail being slightly reformatted on
this list (my PGP signatures all break, indicating that something happened
to the message body, but my messages are still legible so I don't think
this is a related issue - besides, I've tested the BrailleNote without
this list's intervention). If, however, a transport of an ISP, say an
earlier version of Sendmail or Exim, delivers one of your messages in its
current condition then it may or may not corrupt the message before it
reaches the recipient's mailbox. I am a case of this. At that point,
viewing, printing or embossing on any platform will result in jumbled
output, from simple line and spacing splits to actual message omissions.
If the message gets through unhampered, then viewing the message may be
difficult if the client cannot wrap. If however the client or its user
saves your messages and then opens them into an intelligent editor, or
processes them with a text reformatter, they can get back a pretty
reasonable estimation of what you intended them to see. For instance, if
your right margin is set at 80 characters, they can do the same with their
reformatter and get roughly equivalent results. They may even be able to
estimate whether or not line breaks existing in the text should or
shouldn't be represented as such - whether they really intended to end the
line or were simply whitespace. Displaying, printing or embossing are all
possible, but the client needs to wrap in some way. Ann is among the few
people who uses a non-wrapping client, but the client works under the
assumption that your mail is already wrapped. Windows clients, however,
including all Microsoft clients and derivatives (inclusive of KeyMail),
all simply reformat the text and add line breaks for you for readability,
so you wouldn't notice anything differently if the message had in fact new
line pairs at your approximate right margin.
Any further questions? :-)
Cheers,
Sabahattin
--
Thought for the day:
A penny saved is ridiculous.
Sabahattin Gucukoglu
Phone: +44 20 7,502-1615
Mobile: +44 7986 053399
http://www.sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/
Email/MSN: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
