On Tue, Apr 20, 2004 at 10:23:20AM -0700, Jonathan McPherson wrote: > Hey all, > > I use mutt to read my email, and vim to compose messages. Judging > from the headers on the mail messages around the list, many of you > are in the same boat. > > I like my email to be as well-formatted as possible. Towards that > end, I use a paragraph formatter named par[1] to format my email > messages. par reflows paragraphs and chooses line breaks that are > optimal (in some sense), using a dynamic programming algorithm that > outperforms the greedy one used by "fmt" and most other mail > clients. > > Anyhow, my messages tend to consist of at least three different > classes of text: > > 1. Paragraphs - the most basic unit. These may contain a quote > prefix (>, etc), an indent, or some other prefix, which must be > preserved as the paragraph is reflowed to email line length. > > 2. Lists - such as this one. These are formatted as "hanging > indent" paragraphs. For instance, this list is formatted as a set > of paragraphs with a hanging indent of 3. > > 3. Raw - text that should not be touched by the formatter. For > instance, code snippets and my signature could be considered to be > "raw" text. > > At any rate, my current system of email formatting is somewhat > time-consuming. Parts of the email that fall into class (1) must be > passed to par; parts that fall into class (2) must be passed to par > with a special argument indicating the level of hanging indent to be > used; and parts that fall into class (3) must not be passed to par. > Thus, I must manually highlight groups of lines and filter them > through par with the appropriate command-line options. This only > takes a few seconds, but it's something that could be automated. > > So, the question for you Unix/text gurus is simply: what do you use > for your email? and do you have any recommendations for how I could > automate the above process? Ideally I'd like to just have the > entire email filtered through one script that Does the Right Thing. > > I'm thinking about using awk to separate the classes and pass them > to par, but I'm having more trouble doing that than seems > reasonable. Of course, I've never used awk before, so... (-: > > Thanks! > > -jam > > [1] http://www.nicemice.net/par/
I use gq} I don't know whether you'll find it to be less or more of a pain. -- I usually have a GPG digital signature included as an attachment. See http://www.gnupg.org/ for info about these digital signatures. My key was last signed 10/14/2003. If you use GPG *please* see me about signing the key. ***** My computer can't give you viruses by email. ***
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