On Tue, Apr 14, 2015 at 06:03:07PM +1000, Rohan McLeod wrote:
This solution or something like it would probably work perfectly; with a CLI email client like mutt; but for better or worse I'm addicted to GUI. Now the problem is many people are using integrated or stand alone GUI email clients,
Thunderbird + External Editor plugin + gvim are all GUI progams. if you don't like vi, there are numerous other non-modal editors which might be more to your taste that also have useful features like piping blocks of text through filters like par or boxes or whatever. unfortunately, i can't remember the names of any because i pretty much exclusively use vi in its many incarnations. prorgammer's editors are more likely to have features like this.
which seem to do a poor job of preventing email formatting being mangled by transmission. (I have been sending all of my emails on this thread to myself prior to sending them to the list. Some are mangled some are not.)
i think you are misinterpreting what is happening. if an MUA or an MTA "mangles" mail during transmission then it is broken by design - they are not supposed to do that, ever. i suspect what is actually happening is that you are using an editor which does soft line-wraps as well as manually inserting line-feeds. this *looks* OK in your editor with its settings and with the width of its window but looks wrong to the receiver (and looks wrong to you because the window size and/or word-wrap settings in your mail viewer don't exactly match those of your mail editor) in other words, the program isn't mangling your messages, you are. this is why par is so useful. e.g. i read and write my mail in terminals of various widths, sometimes 80 columns, more usually 132 or more depending on screen size and font size etc)....but i don't have to care too much about word-wrapping because i routinely reformat every paragraph i write or quote with par. it reformats the paragraphs with a hard line-feed at roughly every 72 chars.
Since it is unlikely all those GUI email users are about to return to CLI; the question arises how to get all those different GUI email clients to produce emails which would appear the same in a CLI one.
some GUI mail clients allow you to use an external editor. this would allow you to use gvim (a GUI version of vi) or some other program capable of piping paragraphs through par....or, at least, an editor capable of showing the difference between soft word-wrapping and hard line-feeds in your text. e.g. i used to use a plugin called External Editor with Thunderbird, so that I could edit my messages with gvim. for short messages i used the built-in editor, but if i needed to do any non-trivial editing, i'd click the External Editor button and do the job in gvim. if you like seamonkey, you'd probably like thunderbird - it's also by the mozilla devs. it's a standalone GUI mail client, without the web browser. craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au> BOFH excuse #446: Mailer-daemon is busy burning your message in hell.