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Re: How to display format=flowed?



On 2005-10-12 02:13:30 -0500, Kyle Wheeler wrote:

> >On 2005-10-10 | 14:55:34, Kyle Wheeler wrote:
>>>>How can I correctly display (rewrap to terminal width)
>>>>format=flowed messages?
> >>It should "Just Work" - what is going wrong?

> >It is not rewrapped to screen-width:
> >http://www.hostmaster.org/~thomasz/format=flowed.png
> >http://www.hostmaster.org/~thomasz/format=flowed.txt
> >(First paragraph should be flowed)

> Hmm, that is odd... now that you mention it, it isn't working for me 
> either. It used to... (or maybe I'm just remembering my brief experience 
> with mutt-ng?) this seems like a bug. You can submit it to 
> http://bugs.mutt.org (or I can).

By re-flowing, you mean "extend the line width to 140 characters"?

No, mutt doesn't do that.  And no, it's not a bug.  If mutt-ng does
it, it's a good reason not to use mutt-ng.

Why?  Reader-friendly lines are well below 80 characters long.
Currently, the format=flowed handler will try hard not to output
lines over 77 characters long.  I regularly use mutt in xterms well
over 80 columns wide, because that's useful for the index.  But I
would object to a change to mutt that would reformat any
format=flowed message to the full width of that window just because
we can.

Additionally, the format=flowed handler is written to do as little
re-flowing as possible, on the theory that format=flowed messages
are normally formatted to be well readable as plain text.  From my
mail reading experience, that theory has proven to be largely right.

-- 
Thomas Roessler · Personal soap box at <http://log.does-not-exist.org/>.

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