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Re: How to display format=flowed?



On 2005-10-12 | 10:11:11, Thomas Roessler wrote:
By re-flowing, you mean "extend the line width to 140 characters"?

To whatever width the terminal can display.

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.

Reflowing to the width of the terminal or GUI windows is, what format=flowed is all about. Not doing it is certainly a bug.

Why?  Reader-friendly lines are well below 80 characters long.

For printed newspapers it is customary to limit the line length to about 30 characters, BUT
1.) newspapers would otherwise have lines far longer than on a computer
        screen
2.) newspapers use columns
3.) newspapers are seldom held exactly horizontally
4.) newspapers use hyphenation

In fact there are some scientific studies on online reading performance (Dyson and Kipping, Duchnicky and Kolers) that show that longer lines are read faster than narrow ones.

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.

Then this should be made configurable as almost everything else in mutt

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.

Ancient terminals were limited to 80 characters. Ancient user agents did not do any rewrapping at all. Ancient transport agents employed line buffers limited to 80 charcters. Format=flowed was designed to overcome these limitations and nicely rewrap messages for bigger windows and terminals while remaining compatible with old applications.

Tom

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