Re: [luv-talk] readability (was Re: torrent software)
Mark Trickett wrote:
Hello Rohan,
On Sun, 2015-04-12 at 20:51 +1000, Rohan McLeod wrote:
Craig Sanders wrote:
Rohan, just a request but would you mind formatting your paragraphs in a readable manner? Craig ;I will give some thought to your suggestion, but somehow I doubt things will change much. .............snip
I see similar "issues" with your postings as does Craig. I suspect that the effects we see are related to the "editor" component settings. I do not use "Seamonkey", and do not know whether there is an internal editor, or whether you have set up an external editor. I suspect that changing the "window" width while replying may have something to do with what we see. There may also be a setting for where to set word wrap to happen,..............snip
SeaMonkey-email (the editor) is integral to the browser. There seem to be two separate issues here 1/ the email is not appearing as I intended it to appear 2/ possibly the way I intend it to appear; is not as some might wish it. An explanation for 2/; might go as follows: I notice that I often have battles with my word processor; which used to be Libre-write but now is mostly Abiword. I suspect that my ' paragraph formatting ' style is somewhat eccentric; and at odds with convention and what the developer had in mind. In particular: - it breaks sentences where I don't want them broken - it stops me starting sentences on a new line How can I put it ?; unconventional layout others unhappy; conventional layout me unhappy; better others unhappy ! Regarding 1/ which is also happening; I am going to try to stick to full screen editing and will try sending it to myself first; to see what scrambling is occuring ........................................................................... Well I have just recieved back this email; it seems pretty much as I intended except the quoted stuff is now blue; and the delimiter symbol has changed from | to > regards Rohan McLeod
On 13/04/15 10:45, Rohan McLeod wrote:
Mark Trickett wrote:
Hello Rohan,
On Sun, 2015-04-12 at 20:51 +1000, Rohan McLeod wrote:
Craig Sanders wrote:
Rohan, just a request but would you mind formatting your paragraphs in a readable manner? Craig ;I will give some thought to your suggestion, but somehow I doubt things will change much. .............snip
I see similar "issues" with your postings as does Craig. I suspect that the effects we see are related to the "editor" component settings. I do not use "Seamonkey", and do not know whether there is an internal editor, or whether you have set up an external editor. I suspect that changing the "window" width while replying may have something to do with what we see. There may also be a setting for where to set word wrap to happen,..............snip
SeaMonkey-email (the editor) is integral to the browser.
There seem to be two separate issues here 1/ the email is not appearing as I intended it to appear 2/ possibly the way I intend it to appear; is not as some might wish it. [...]
I use thunderbird, which I suspect has the same behaviour. As you type, the screen display "soft wraps" around the classic 80 columns, but the outgoing email is sent as long lines. On my screen as I type this it has wrapped "email" to a new line. _This_ has been manually wrapped to a new line, I do this when I want it to stand out from the forgoing text. Now this is showing to me with a clear line above. When I receive the long line format thunderbird will display it wrapped to 80 columns. I would need to experiment to see what happens to quoted text in replies, I think it does it with smarts to keep it readable. In the old days whatever the mail agent it was that I was using did automatic hard wrapping (settable, default 72) and was selectable for text and or html output. The hard wrap became a pain when you wanted to edit something and keep a tidy format. More useful would have been to do soft wrap at the composition phase, converting it to hard wrap upon transmission.
On 13/04/15 14:50, Allan Duncan wrote:
On 13/04/15 10:45, Rohan McLeod wrote:
Mark Trickett wrote:
Hello Rohan,
On Sun, 2015-04-12 at 20:51 +1000, Rohan McLeod wrote:
Craig Sanders wrote:
Rohan, just a request but would you mind formatting your paragraphs in a readable manner? Craig ;I will give some thought to your suggestion, but somehow I doubt things will change much. .............snip
I see similar "issues" with your postings as does Craig. I suspect that the effects we see are related to the "editor" component settings. I do not use "Seamonkey", and do not know whether there is an internal editor, or whether you have set up an external editor. I suspect that changing the "window" width while replying may have something to do with what we see. There may also be a setting for where to set word wrap to happen,..............snip
SeaMonkey-email (the editor) is integral to the browser.
There seem to be two separate issues here 1/ the email is not appearing as I intended it to appear 2/ possibly the way I intend it to appear; is not as some might wish it. [...]
I use thunderbird, which I suspect has the same behaviour. As you type, the screen display "soft wraps" around the classic 80 columns, but the outgoing email is sent as long lines. On my screen as I type this it has wrapped "email" to a new line. _This_ has been manually wrapped to a new line, I do this when I want it to stand out from the forgoing text.
Now this is showing to me with a clear line above. When I receive the long line format thunderbird will display it wrapped to 80 columns. I would need to experiment to see what happens to quoted text in replies, I think it does it with smarts to keep it readable.
In the old days whatever the mail agent it was that I was using did automatic hard wrapping (settable, default 72) and was selectable for text and or html output. The hard wrap became a pain when you wanted to edit something and keep a tidy format. More useful would have been to do soft wrap at the composition phase, converting it to hard wrap upon transmission.
Ah-ha! Thunderbird will display long lines wrapped to suit the current display width, and on replying the newly quoted long lines are hard wrapped about 60.
On Mon, Apr 13, 2015 at 03:01:35PM +1000, Allan Duncan wrote:
Ah-ha! Thunderbird will display long lines wrapped to suit the current display width, and on replying the newly quoted long lines are hard wrapped about 60.
when i used to use thunderbird regularly (at $previous_job), i used a plugin called (IIRC) External Editor, which allowed me to use gvim to edit messages. this gave me full access to vi's ease of use(*) and vi's features, including piping text through prgrams like par or boxes. (*) vi is incredibly easy to USE. it's slightly difficult to LEARN vi's advanced features (but vi's basic features can be learnt in half an hour or less) craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>
On 13/04/15 15:22, Craig Sanders wrote:
On Mon, Apr 13, 2015 at 03:01:35PM +1000, Allan Duncan wrote:
Ah-ha! Thunderbird will display long lines wrapped to suit the current display width, and on replying the newly quoted long lines are hard wrapped about 60.
when i used to use thunderbird regularly (at $previous_job), i used a plugin called (IIRC) External Editor, which allowed me to use gvim to edit messages.
this gave me full access to vi's ease of use(*) and vi's features, including piping text through prgrams like par or boxes.
(*) vi is incredibly easy to USE. it's slightly difficult to LEARN vi's advanced features (but vi's basic features can be learnt in half an hour or less)
Agreed, so I use about 10% of its capability. One day I'm going to learn how to get it to record a set of operations and then repeatedly apply them, or how to use wild cards properly. So much to do, so little time left.
On Mon, Apr 13, 2015 at 10:45:33AM +1000, Rohan McLeod wrote:
How can I put it ?; unconventional layout others unhappy; conventional layout me unhappy; better others unhappy !
fair enough. however, another perspective worth considering is: the primary purpose of writing something is to communicate. nothing gets communicated if your potential audience aren't willing to put in the effort to actually read what you've written. craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>
On 13 April 2015 at 15:26, Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au> wrote:
On Mon, Apr 13, 2015 at 10:45:33AM +1000, Rohan McLeod wrote:
How can I put it ?; unconventional layout others unhappy; conventional layout me unhappy; better others unhappy !
fair enough. however, another perspective worth considering is:
the primary purpose of writing something is to communicate. nothing gets communicated if your potential audience aren't willing to put in the effort to actually read what you've written.
With this I would concur. At work sometime ago I did an Information Mapping [1] course. The tactical writing component strongly places the focus of written communications on the intended audience's needs. It ask you to consider their level of knowledge and interest so that you can craft your message accordingly.
From my perspective the issues I have with Rohan's formatting are a lack of white space and overuse of the semi-colon.
Till today I really didn't understand the correct use of the semi-colon either; the following page at The Oatmeal set me straight ( http://theoatmeal.com/comics/semicolon). BTW the wikipedia page on semi-colons seems to indicate an order of precedence amongst the various punctuation marks. [1] For a quick summary see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_mapping -- Colin Fee tfeccles@gmail.com
Craig Sanders wrote:
On Mon, Apr 13, 2015 at 10:45:33AM +1000, Rohan McLeod wrote:
How can I put it ?; unconventional layout others unhappy; conventional layout me unhappy; better others unhappy ! fair enough. however, another perspective worth considering is:
the primary purpose of writing something is to communicate. nothing gets communicated if your potential audience aren't willing to put in the effort to actually read what you've written
Yes; well as mentioned that was the second of two issues identified ; perhaps if the the first one is fixed, the second may not arise. To reiterate: "There seem to be two separate issues here 1/ the email is not appearing as I intended it to appear 2/ possibly the way I intend it to appear; is not as some might wish it. So Craig; harking back to your original email: "if your editor is capable of it, you could try piping paragraphs through 'par' to reformat them nicely. it's what i do using mutt & vim " 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, 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.) 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. It occurs to me that a necessary condition may be that a GUI email client should be capable of sending an email to itself without mangling the format ? What will be a sufficient condition ? - transmission seemed to lose line wrap for "through 'par'.." and "CLI; the question...." regards Rohan McLeod
On Mon, 13 Apr 2015 12:45:33 AM Rohan McLeod wrote:
How can I put it ?; unconventional layout others unhappy; conventional layout me unhappy; better others unhappy !
Unconventional layout usually means others delete your messages without reading them. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/
Russell Coker wrote:
On Mon, 13 Apr 2015 12:45:33 AM Rohan McLeod wrote:
How can I put it ?; unconventional layout others unhappy; conventional layout me unhappy; better others unhappy ! Unconventional layout usually means others delete your messages without reading them.
Yes Craig made that point to, but as mentioned that was the second of two issues identified ; perhaps if the the first one is fixed, the second may not arise. To reiterate: "There seem to be two separate issues here 1/ the email is not appearing as I intended it to appear 2/ possibly the way I intend it to appear; is not as some might wish it. So harking back to Craig's original email: "if your editor is capable of it, you could try piping paragraphs through 'par' to reformat them nicely. it's what i do using mutt & vim " 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, 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.) 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. It occurs to me that a necessary condition may be that a GUI email client should be capable of sending an email to itself without mangling the format ? What will be a sufficient condition ? - transmission seemed to lose line wrap for "through 'par'.." and "CLI; the question...." regards Rohan McLeod
Hello Rohan, On Tue, 2015-04-14 at 18:03 +1000, Rohan McLeod wrote:
Russell Coker wrote:
On Mon, 13 Apr 2015 12:45:33 AM Rohan McLeod wrote:
How can I put it ?; unconventional layout others unhappy; conventional layout me unhappy; better others unhappy ! Unconventional layout usually means others delete your messages without reading them.
Yes Craig made that point to, but as mentioned that was the second of two issues identified ; perhaps if the the first one is fixed, the second may not arise.
To reiterate: "There seem to be two separate issues here 1/ the email is not appearing as I intended it to appear 2/ possibly the way I intend it to appear; is not as some might wish it.
It might help for some partial compromise, I have found your recent emails much more readable. Evolution, and probably most email clients, will wrap long lines. On Unix systems, including Linux, long lines wrap well, but interspersed with short lines, or lines of variable length, it can be hard reading. Being aware of how your text will appear helps, including how you use white space. I cope with your liberal sprinkling of semicolons, even if not my style, but when there are a lack of clearly defined blocks, it makes comprehension difficult.
So harking back to Craig's original email: "if your editor is capable of it, you could try piping paragraphs through 'par' to reformat them nicely. it's what i do using mutt & vim "
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, 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.)
Competent software works well, but knowing and understanding on the part of the user is a big aid. This is a big part of why I dislike HTML email, and that trying to reply except by top posting or bottom posting is painful, to put it very mildly.
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. It occurs to me that a necessary condition may be that a GUI email client should be capable of sending an email to itself without mangling the format ? What will be a sufficient condition ?
- transmission seemed to lose line wrap for "through 'par'.." and "CLI; the question...."
Understanding where things started, what was supported, and how much has been grossly abused is an excellent start. As to your choices in formatting, remember that you are trying to communicate with others. Sometimes it can be very worth while being cognisant of the conventions, and why they came about. There can be times to run counter, with thoughtful intent.
regards Rohan McLeod
Regards, Mark Trickett
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.
Craig Sanders wrote:
On Tue, Apr 14, 2015 at 06:03:07PM +1000, Rohan McLeod wrote: 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.
Yes ; this seems like the problem the email editor is either mis-configured or being mis-used so my fragmented offerings whilst not what I intend, are my fault. Eventually I may understand the problem fully and if a solution , necessarrily involves moving to another email client, adding processing to the output of the editor etc , I may consider that. But in the interim about all I can offer is reduced or zero emails ; or just simply unsubscribe. regards Rohan McLeod
Sorry, but this thread is still going and I can't hold myself back anymore. Rohan, I don't read your posts for two reasons: 1. the formatting is ugly; and 2. they're unintelligible. I usually have NO IDEA what you're talking about. Fixing the first point isn't going to fix the second point.
Quoting Trent W. Buck (trentbuck@gmail.com):
Sorry, but this thread is still going and I can't hold myself back anymore. Rohan, I don't read your posts for two reasons:
1. the formatting is ugly; and
They look fine in mutt. ;-> Moreover, beautifully framed in a nice xterm, so it's even graphical.
Rohan McLeod wrote:
Craig Sanders wrote:
in other words, the program isn't mangling your messages, you are.
Yes ; this seems like the problem the email editor is either mis-configured or being mis-used so my fragmented offerings whilst not what I intend, are my fault. Eventually I may understand the problem fully and if a solution , necessarrily involves moving to another email client, adding processing to the output of the editor etc , I may consider that. But in the interim about all I can offer is reduced or zero emails ; or just simply unsubscribe.
regards Rohan McLeod
Rohan, I'd hate to see you unsubscribe for as Craig said at the beginning of this thread "you usually have something interesting and worthwhile to say". I do sincerely hope that you've not taken the efforts proffered in this thread to heart as I genuinely believe that we've been trying to help. To that end I'm writing this reply from the SeaMonkey email client (albeit the portable app version running on my work supplied Win 7 laptop). It's SeaMonkey version 2.33.1. It does look remarkably like Thunderbird. I've set it to edit in plain text by default and I'm cc'ing this to my work account to see what it looks like. So I've had a quick look through the preferences of the SeaMonkey client software. (Edit -> Preferences... -> Mail & Newsgroups) I can see the following might be relevant. - Message Display - Plain text messages Wrap text to fit window width - is checked by default - Composition - General Wrap plain text messages at [72] characters - is the default setting (which as i type has caused this line to wrap in the window in front of me and which is much wider than 72 chars). What are you equivalent settings? Regards, Colin.
Colin Fee wrote:
Rohan McLeod wrote:
[unnecessary reply content snipped]
Rohan,
I'd hate to see you unsubscribe for as Craig said at the beginning of this thread "you usually have something interesting and worthwhile to say". I do sincerely hope that you've not taken the efforts proffered in this thread to heart as I genuinely believe that we've been trying to help.
To that end I'm writing this reply from the SeaMonkey email client (albeit the portable app version running on my work supplied Win 7 laptop). It's SeaMonkey version 2.33.1. It does look remarkably like Thunderbird.
I've set it to edit in plain text by default and I'm cc'ing this to my work account to see what it looks like.
So I've replied to my own post and it would seem that the SeaMonkey editor wraps the quoted text (above) at the 72 char mark. Compare the three attached screen grabs (apologies for the attachments but I'm pressed for time right now, need to be out the door in about 5 mins to get to fencing training). 1. Screen grab from my work web gmail interface via chrome. Note that the original reply via seamonkey didn't wrap with hard new lines. See work-gmail.png 2. My original seamonkey reply as viewed in seamonkey. Note again no wrapping i.e. long lines displayed. See seamonkey.png 3. What you see when you hit reply in seamonkey. See reply-wrapped.png
Hmm maybe apologies all for the multiple replies, clearly SeaMonkey had some sort of fit. How embarrasment. On 15/04/2015 6:32 PM, "Colin Fee" <tfeccles@gmail.com> wrote:
Colin Fee wrote:
Rohan McLeod wrote:
[unnecessary reply content snipped]
Rohan,
I'd hate to see you unsubscribe for as Craig said at the beginning of this thread "you usually have something interesting and worthwhile to say". I do sincerely hope that you've not taken the efforts proffered in this thread to heart as I genuinely believe that we've been trying to help.
To that end I'm writing this reply from the SeaMonkey email client (albeit the portable app version running on my work supplied Win 7 laptop). It's SeaMonkey version 2.33.1. It does look remarkably like Thunderbird.
I've set it to edit in plain text by default and I'm cc'ing this to my work account to see what it looks like.
So I've replied to my own post and it would seem that the SeaMonkey editor wraps the quoted text (above) at the 72 char mark. Compare the three attached screen grabs (apologies for the attachments but I'm pressed for time right now, need to be out the door in about 5 mins to get to fencing training).
1. Screen grab from my work web gmail interface via chrome. Note that the original reply via seamonkey didn't wrap with hard new lines. See work-gmail.png
2. My original seamonkey reply as viewed in seamonkey. Note again no wrapping i.e. long lines displayed. See seamonkey.png
3. What you see when you hit reply in seamonkey. See reply-wrapped.png
participants (8)
-
Allan Duncan -
Colin Fee -
Craig Sanders -
Mark Trickett -
Rick Moen -
Rohan McLeod -
Russell Coker -
Trent W. Buck