On Thursday, June 21 at 03:01 PM, quoth Mutt:
The point is that when you explicitly set wrap to something other than 0, you ask mutt to display text not wider than your limit. I'm afraid in these cases mutt will have to break all lines (all fixed-format mails, all fixed lines in flowed-format mails) in order to do what you configured it to.
No, that's wrong. Fixed lines in flowed-format mails are *specifically* fixed. Mutt can break them if they're too long, but it's not allowed to rewrap them if they can be displayed as-is.
Even were it the case that this were a badly-formatted format=flowed message (which it is not), mutt should still try to display it properly, in the "be liberal in what you accept" vein.Though I agree on the last part, I still think the mail is badly formatted.
It is not. From RFC 2646, 4.1:
A Format=Flowed message consists of zero or more paragraphs,
each containing one or more flowed lines followed by one fixed
line. The usual case is a series of flowed text lines with
blank (empty) fixed lines between them.
Any number of fixed lines can appear between paragraphs.
I don't see the point of composing a paragraph of text as fixed lines in a format=flowed mail while hoping and requesting everything to render well on the receiver's side.
My RFC quotes up above are good examples of why you would want that. If those lines were "flowed", the indenting I put in front of them would make them rather unreadable. Instead, I removed the space from the end of each line of indented text, so that it would not be flowed. Check out what it would look like if I hadn't:
A Format=Flowed message consists of zero or more paragraphs, each containing one or more flowed lines followed by one fixed line. The usual case is a series of flowed text lines with blank (empty) fixed lines between them.
Here's another example: let's say I wanted to include a small shell script or bit of code in an email. I would say:
#!/bin/sh
echo this is a script!
echo this demonstrates why some things in a \
format=flowed message should not be flowed
But if I leave the spaces at the end and allow it to be flowed:
#!/bin/sh
echo this is a script!
echo this demonstrates why some things in a \
format=flowed message should not be flowed
Thus, the fact that there are spaces at the end is IMPORTANT to correct display of the email. The mailer should not simply ignore them and assume that all lines in a format=flowed message are permitted to be flowed.
Being allowed to reflow text also includes to render it narrower than the sender intended and possibly causing ugly rendering. What if you were viewing the message on a device with less than 80 columns? It will look ugly again unless the sender adds proper spaces to make up reflowable paragraphs.
The sender has chosen to explicitly decide what lines can and cannot be flowed, and may have very good reasons for that. The mailer should respect that information, and not disregard it just because SOME parts of the message need can be reformatted.
~Kyle --The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher regard those who think alike than those who think differently.
-- Nietzsche
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