Peter, Sorry for causing any trouble. I only recently joined this group and I wasn't aware of this groups' desire for 80 character line lengths limits. I never intended to suggest that all email revolves around MS Outlook. I use it because it works well for me. I know that the mail readers in Netscape and IE both support autowrap and the ability to size the window as desired. When this approach is used for email, the added paragraph, so they don't scramble the contents of the email. So, nesting can continue forever, if desired. I (and others) think this is a big advantage - especially in mail groups where replies bounce back and forth. But, it's just suggestion. BTW, would it cause you any problems to turn wrap on? This way you could handle any line length you encountered. Mark Champion Sony Electronics 206-524-0014 mark.champion(a)am.sony.com ----- Original Message ----- From: "Pete Turnbull" <pete(a)dunnington.u-net.com> To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Thursday, June 15, 2000 1:30 AM Subject: Re: Tek 4014/5 emulation

On Thu, Jun 15, 2000 at 08:30:08AM +0000, Pete Turnbull wrote: Hear hear! Definitely. Sometimes it gets silly if there are 10 levels of nesting at once, but usually that's just because people are quoting everything in sight instead of having the consideration to trim out the parts that are no longer relevant. So the multi-nested stuff shouldn't be there to begin with. Actually my little homebrew editor has something like that, it will rejustify a block of text, and remove/reinsert any specified prefix string around the operation. I use it for reformatting comment blocks in assembly language source (i.e. fill to the right margin while preserving the "; " or "<tab>; " prefix on each line). I've always meant to write a stand-alone UNIX version of that command, for just this reason (to use instead of "{!}fmt -80" in vi). Putting a quote characters only at the beginning of paragraphs is really annoying IMHO. It just doesn't catch your eye the way having a prefix on each line does, and even if the mailer or pager or terminal handles does wrapping (not necessarily at word boundaries) while you're displaying the msg (which BTW gets a very distracting series of reverse-video plus signs in the "mutt" mailer I use), that doesn't help you when you're in the editor composing a reply to the msg. At least in some editors, you only see 80 columns of long lines at a time, so in order to read the paragraph you have to arrow your way through the whole line. Don't get me started on HTML in email! If the person *created* the message by simply typing a few lines of ASCII text, why should we see it any other way? Who said it's supposed to look like a magazine article. It's especially annoying in plain text mailers, where the actual message text is dwarfed by the header/trailer boilerplate and pointless font changes and line after line of &nbsp; strings. And what's up with the quoted-printable crap with all the equals signs? It's nice to have a way to represent funny characters, but most of the time you don't need that and even if you do you're taking a gamble that the person receiving the msg has a terminal which can display that character. Meanwhile the plain text is all screwed up, especially if it contains real live equals signs, and some mailers seem to convert every ocurrence of the letter "F" to "=46", well I suppose that's a workaround for the UNIX ">From " atrocity which is another constant annoyance. And if you're going to put "soft" line breaks into the text, at least put them at the actual line breaks!!! Boy, I miss the days when the pinnacle of "letter quality" output was to make it seem as if the author had taken the trouble to type the letter up on a real live typewriter. John Wilson D Bit