Re: ASCII Art Fart for Sun, Jan 21, '01

Veruschka <se...@the.end.of.my.post> wrote:

> @--Best setting is 74, that way you make sure i won't wrap in any
> newsreader,
> @--including the ones using a text-only (80 columns) screen.
> 
> The reason why I set it at 85 is, as demonstrated in the quote right
> above, a 70-ish setting would split a long line of words into two (see how
> the word 'newsreader' being pushed to a new line), resulting in
> 'irregular' quoting (I mean, some lines with the prefix for quotation,
> like my "@--", whereas some without).  But setting it with a larger number
> attenuates the problem.  Could anyone explain why, please?

okies, i'll give it a try:

a pretty standard line lenght for *writing* emails and newsgroup
messages is 72 characters...  the standard for *reading* those messages
however is 80 chars... this is to have some headroom for quoting
characters etc - but here is where the problem starts, let's try an
example:

i'm writing a message with a 72 character line wrap, and you want to
respond to it... now you want to respond to it and your newsreader adds
some quoting characters to my message, making my lines basically 74
chars long.  now, if your newsreader is not very clever [or not properly
configured] it will try to rewrap those lines to 72 chars, which of
course results in broken lines.  the only solution that i know to this
problem is to use a newsreader that recognises quoted passages and
allows them to "grow" longer...  so in the above example, my quoted text
would be sent back at 74 chars and new added text would be wrapped to 72
chars...  if i would reply back, the original text would become 76 chars
[72 + 2 + 2], your text would be posted at 74 [72 + 2] and the freshly
added text would be wrapped to 72...  we could go on like this for 2
more times, after that the original message would grow over 80
characters long and therefore it will be wrapped anyway by the reading
preferences... my newsreader warns me when this is about to happen and
advises me to rewrap the quotes.

as a sidenote, you should use the standard quoting character "> "
instead of "@--" because many newsreader will recognise the first one
but not your variation of it...


> Another question, if I don't choose the 'word wrap' option at all, would
> the ASCII art still be displayed properly? (as you can clearly see, I
> really have no idea what 'word wrap' is about whatsoever!)  What if I
> 'manually' do the word wrap (that is, hitting the carriage return key from
> time to time)? Would that be worse and why?

well, if you turn off word wrap the lines would grow until you set a
hard return manually.  while this is not a problem with ascii art pics
[where you want to manually controll the wrap anyway], it would be one
with normal text messages like this one.  it's not very convenient to
write without an auto word wrap, as every correction in the upper part
would force you do do a lot of manual correction to get proper alingment
again.  if you send a message without any returns at all, some readers
will have to do a lot of scrolling to read what you wrote ;]


> Veruschka <se...@the.end.of.my.post>

actually, there is nothing to see at the end of your post [well, at
least nothing about your email address ;] - are you french or canadian?

obascii: 
well, i decided to label it to make clear what it should be ;]
   
 .________..___.
 | TRUCK. || ##| 
 '()()^^()"=()-'

   
++ christoph ++
berlin, germany
--
mailto:zem(at)mailcc.com

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