Sunday, April 15, 2001, 5:09:03 PM, Nick Andriash wrote:
ACM>>> Some of the editors great formatting routines such as the
ACM>>> reformatting of quoted material will lead to this sort of
ACM>>> limitation.
NA> Sorry I'm coming in late on this thread, but could you refresh my memory
NA> on what sort of limitations Allie was talking about?
The formatting routines involved in reformatting quoted material,
include having the ability to dynamically remove and re-insert the
necessary quote-levels at the beginning of each line while
reformatting, ie. the initials and >-sign(s), or just the >-sign(s) in
the case of non-TB! quoted material.
NA> Just for clarification, a soft return is one where the line
NA> automatically wraps, and a hard return is where the User actually
NA> hits the "Enter" key, is that correct? What you are proposing is
NA> that TB! not use hard returns where soft returns would normally
NA> go?
No, the problem I've run into, is that when auto-format is turned on,
a return is only honored when you hit it twice in a row. This makes
it, for example, impossible to create lists of short-items with one
item on each line, unless you insert a blank line between them. Typing
the first space on a new line now causes the cursor to return to one
space after the last character of the previous line, simply because
there is room there.
AFAIK, the editor in TB! makes no difference between a return at the
end of a line which was inserted by the formatter, and a return that
was entered by the user.
NA> If TB!'s Editor was to do that, and realising that PGP wraps/signs
NA> a message *before* the MUA would... in your example... replace the
NA> soft returns with hard returns, it would have to be such that
NA> there was absolutely no difference in the two messages... not even
NA> one character... otherwise the PGP signature would be broken. Do
NA> you feel that condition would be met if TB! were to make those
NA> changes after the User hit the "Send" button?
OK, I have to admit that I'm unfamiliar with the order of actions
happening when I hit the send button, and therefore was unaware that
PGP is called before TB! would replace these characters.
I'm suggesting that the editor would be made to make a difference
between returns resulting from the auto-format and auto-wrap
functions, and the ones entered by the user, in such a way that it
would become possible to create short-lists and if necessary edit the
signature, without the auto-format concatening lines together that
were intended as separate lines in the first place.
It would need to do this only for the duration of message editing. One
might even argue that TB! could store the message in this way
(including soft returns) unless the message is to be signed and/or
encrypted, so future editing would result in the same situation.
It was argued that one would want to make the message in such a way
that it comes up identically on the recipients screen, but is my
belief that this is only necessary for lines that were user-terminated
by a hard return anyway, and is much less important for flowing
paragraphs.
One problem would however still remain: unless the original text of
the message being replied to were to arrive in 'flowing paragraphs' as
well (which causes other problems such as having to wrap the message
at a predefined width or at the edge of the window in order to avoid
horizontal scrolling), there is no way for the reformatter to know
where to separate two paragraphs that were not separated by a blank
line.
NA> Again I am presuming you were referring to the quirkiness of the
NA> TB! Editor's auto-format feature, and that a re-make of the Editor
NA> such that it would allow for soft returns would eliminate such
NA> quirkiness?
Correct.
--
Maurice
ICQ: 15724776
WWW: http://www.kiap.net/
Thawte Web of Trust Notary, see http://www.thawte.com/
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