Post formats

Los, others list-ites:

Sorry if my replies are hard to read (due to format... and perhaps other
reasons...). I'm on the digest. In order to reply, I can hit reply and
chop out page after page after page to leave only what I want to reply
to or open a new message, cut and paste what I want, and add my comments
in the new mail. This latter is my usual course.

What I see in the digest often has quite interesting strings of control
characters visible (20s, which I'm sure is 20 hex, which is 32 - space I
think are quite prevalent...) and sometimes when I do a cut and paste,
you guys get to see exactly what I see in the digest, as ugly as that
can be. The digest (which is plaintext) often shows things that never
appear in individual mailings... and if you get a digest with a posting
from Owen or someone (I've done it once I think) who sends HTML without
meaning to.... well needless to say that looks quite the horror in the
digest plaintext version.

I'm using Communicator 4.6 with it set to wrap plaintext at 72
characters. If it is HTML, it wraps itself. I could set that down, but I
thought being well under 80 columns, it'd be okay for most folk. If this
post looks okay, it should be typical - in the HTML editor I don't line
wrap, but on the outgoing plaintext, the wrap should autoinsert at 72
characters. Sometimes things might look a little funny if I hit return
too at some other place (bad habit... let the tool do the wrapping....
but I code all day so return is a common key). I could try switching to
the strictly plaintext editor to see if that helps. I've tried importing
stuff from notepad sometimes and that too isn't too hot.

Because I'm pasting replies into outgoing messages, I don't get the
wonderful quote character insertions. I generally try to pick a format
that differs from that already used (that is to say, if the quote has >
preceding it, then I try to use *... if the quote has nothing in front
of it, I try to segment my stuff with either -----> or =====>....). This
(I agree) is far from satisfactory. And since stuff is plaintext, I
can't use colour which is an awesome way to separate speakers in HTML
email discussions.

Obviously these posts are hard to read. I'll see what can be done to
make my text more distinct from the text I'm replying to - I do have
sympathy for those poor subjects of this effect and I'd like to make it
easy on folks. What a pain in the hind end. All because my Outlook
bluescreens NT when I try to fire it up <All hail Bill Gates and his
fine product lines...>. It's just a vast many-hour task to reinstall all
the apps and try to match settings if I reinstall NT.... <pathetic
whinge>. And our work target platform is NT 4.0 SP 5 right now. I've
been thining of going to Win 2000 to get Direct X (Rogue Spear, Ashron's
Call, etc). If I do that, maybe I can get Outlook 2000 and get better
functionality.

I will endeavour to do better for readability.

BTW, Adrian - thanks for saying what I should have said more coherently.
You brought out a point I hadn't focused on, but which I ultimately
agree with - if the movie "hangs together" and the characters seem
engaged, then it can often engage me also.

Tom
The Penitent Poster

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