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



On Thu, Oct 13, 2005 at 08:06:50PM +0200, Holger Weiss wrote:
> Sorry for being picky, but if you have a look at a newspaper, you'll
> see that single stories are also split into multiple coloumns if
> they are long enough.  This is done exclusively for readability.

Nonsense.  It's done because the whole newspaper is formatted that
way, so that they can intersperse ads in with the stories.  The layout
of printed text does not change from story to story or from page to
page because it would look absurd, and because of historical
limitations of the presses used to print the papers.

Certainly, I'm not suggesting that readability isn't a factor...  If
the story were printed with lines spanning the entire width of the
newspaper, that would be difficult to read.  But frankly, one of the
reasons I don't read newspapers is because I find the columnar output
much harder to read than say, the same story formatted nicely on a web
page.  All of this is irrelevant.

People's idea of what is readable differs.  Regardless of what the
majority find readable, there will be plenty of people who prefer
something else.  I can see no justifiable reason for not letting them
decide for themselves they want longer lines.

> Also, as I said before, you'll hardly find _any_ book or article or
> whatever with line lengths considerably greater than 80 characters.

Mutt is not a book, a newspaper, or any other sort of printed
material.  It is a computer program.  Computers were created to make
things easier for their users.  As such, they should do what the user
wants them to do, within the realm of what is feasable and reasonable
for the programmer to code.

Your argument against implementing this hinges on entirely subjective
measures applied to an entirely different media, and as such I find it
to be completely inapplicable.  My argument is that users want it,
it's easy to do, impacts NO ONE negatively IN ANY WAY if it is
implemented, and so it should be done.  Is it not that simple?  What
possible logical justification can you provide for opposing the
inclusion of this functionality from Mutt?

Has anyone submitted a patch for this?  If not, will it be included if
one is provided?  If not, can a sensible reason why not be provided?

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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