Hello marek! On Friday, December 27, 2002 at 2:36:11 AM you wrote:
> In precisely the way other clients do. I'm not talking about > brain-dead software like Outlook Express; I'm talking about > *excellent* software such as Forte Agent. Sorry, Agent uses soft-wraps during composition and will only change that to hard-wraps during send. Luckily the developers knew the rouble behind this and decided to soft-wrap at the pre-defined lengths - regardless of the window size. > Specifically, it inserts a newline character where the user didn't. > So again, there is nothing to disttinguish. The program should > simply respect what the user entered. If I want a paragraph break, > I'll press Enter. If I don't, I don't. That's not quite the right way with e-mail, the standard is to have a LB/CR (hard-wrap) at around 72 characters; PGP and Agent, BTW, use exactly that as default. So, you cannot just make up a paragraph by one new line, you need two. Which has become standard even in business letters (instead if indenting the first line of a new paragraph). You do exactly that with TB, it recognises a new paragraph through a blank line. As would the recipient, since indenting the first line is not good enough for recognition on a monitor. > The client can and should break lines at a predefined length when > sending, and all modern email clients do so, although it isn't really > necessary most of the time. 1) Nobody questioned that, to the contrary. 2) What Marck wrote was that the sender should *see* the message the way it will be sent (or even received ...). 3) How come I regularly get messages - mostly from OL/OE - which don't wrap at all, they show even lengthy posts in just one long line? > Does it have to be the same in appearance? Yes. Try making up a table. > Isn't it much more convenient if you can resize the window as you're > typing, and have the text automatically conform to the new size of > the window - and so can the recipient? No. > Isn't it more convenient when, if you add or remove some text inside > a paragraph, the paragraph stays, rather than being split into a > bunch of uneven lines? You can achieve this with TB through Auto-Format, Auto-Wrap, <Alt><l>. > TheBat insists on inserting linebreaks where I didn't enter them. Which it will do regardless of what you see, *as long as it conforms to breaking lines at certain lengths*. You now can see it, with your scheme you won't know how it looks upon sending. > Initially, I thought it was a hitch of an early version that would > eventually be ironed out - but now that it seems to be a > well-entrenched feature, it's still wrong. It's a feature, yes. It's wrong, no. It doesn't fit your needs, maybe. Just because something doesn't works like you want it to be doesn't make it wrong. You know, I am now around three years on these lists using TB for about the same time. This editor discussion pops up every few weeks, one can always see when a new marketing wave has hit, because new users complain about it. Every single time I've found those complaining loudest became the most ardent converts. Like with religion. > (the above is what TheBat did after I inserted "it provides" into a > previously-typed paragraph. I would now have to go back and reformat > it to make it look good. Very awkward. ) You just had to <Alt><l> while your cursor is still in the paragraph. Or use Auto-format. > Simply put, TheBat's editor doesn't have the concept of a paragraph. Not quite, it uses the now common business letter paragraph, everything between two empty lines is a paragraph. > It may be a lot of things, but it is not convenient. And all of the > popular text-only editors for Windows (Textpad, NoteTab, Ultraedit) > managen to avoid this problem. All three mentioned, and Word since 2k, offer free-caret editing ike TB, but they don't have the restriction of using only plain text with a certain line lengths. -- Dierk Haasis The Bat 1.62 Christmas Edition on Windows XP 5.1 2600Service Pack 1 I never think of the future. It comes soon enough. (Albert Einstein) ________________________________________________ Current version is 1.62 | "Using TBUDL" information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
