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Re: How to display format=flowed (and other topics)?



On 2005-10-12 | 19:35:19, Thomas Roessler wrote:
I'm sorry, but that argument goes too short.  format=flowed tells us
that the author is happy about having their text re-flowed.  It also
makes it easier to re-flow text.  But why does that mean that we
*have* to reflow it, instead of making the best use of that
information to make messages as readable as possible?

AFAIK that is not part of the standard but neither is to rewrap messages that do not fit within the terminals display. It is not the scope of the standard to tell e-mail applications how to behave. Format=flowed is all about telling the e-mail applications that it is save to ignore any linebreak preceded by a space character. Most MUAs do just that and rewrap every format=flowed message to best fit the size of the display.

Wrong.  People read e-mail on PDAs and mobile phones (with 40 or
less columns -- i.e., line lengths that are far below the kind of
formatting that you would want senders to inflict on "ordinary"
readers), and format=flowed comes in very handy there.

If everyone is happy with at most 80 columns, why are displays and resolutions growing bigger and bigger? Most PDAs and cell phones do forcibly rewrap non-format=flowed messages anyway. Splitting a 80 character line to 2*40 or 4*20 characters does not really require format=flowed.

Certainly, mutt could have a variable such as
flowed_text_max_width to solve this.  If 0, mutt uses the whole
width of the window.  It could also do that if set to a value
greater than the width of the current terminal.  Then, everyone
gets what they want.

I think that wrapmargin should be replaced by a maxcolumns or displaywidth or max_line variable.

Well, no.

There's a second decision in the code: To only re-flow things if
that has to be because the line doesn't fit the display. It
shouldn't be too difficult to change that, but still, I rather
stubbornly believe that mutt's current code gets it right.

I think that wrapmargin should become a max_line_length instead (that could be negative for the old wrapmargin behaviour) and you may very well add another config option force_rewrap to make everyone happy.

In the meantime:
- Is there any external pager aware of format=flowed?
- Can I create a mailcap entry for format=flowed?
- Can I use a display filter to force rewrapping?

Tom

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