[PLUG] 80 characters (Evolution tips)

[Zot O'Connor]

On Wed, 2003-11-05 at 11:09, AthlonRob wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-11-05 at 10:31, Carla Schroder wrote:
> > On Wednesday 05 November 2003 10:18 am, Keith Lofstrom wrote:

> > OK, I've been staying out of this, but it's all your fault I cannot
> resist. 
> > Why is this even an issue? Both my newsreader and mail clients auto-wrap just 
> > fine.

> When folks don't work wrap and I use Evolution for mail, it makes things
> complicated when I reply (one > for three lines of text).
> 

In evo, you click on the quoted long line, goto the style pulldown which
should say "preformat" and change it to normal.  Walla!  I did above to
the "OK, I've been" line and the word "resist" was wrapped.


Evo will also add > when you click in the middle of the quoted text and
hit return.  I see now that the "resist" only got 1 > when it should
have gotten "> >"

The only bad thing I found recently is when the client had numbered
items like
  1.  Number one
  2.  Number two
  3.  Number three

Evo kept "discovering" this as a "numbered list."  Every time I hit
return in after the "one" it would autorenumber the list so It looked
like:

>  1.  Number one

>  1.  Number two
>  2.  Number three

Minor pain that I will one day fill out a bug report on.


> I think it's just easier for everybody if we cut our lines down to 80
> characters or less.

60 or 72 has been standard for years (print and terminal).  As Jeme
said, either 72 (or less) or no breaks works best.  No breaks does not
always work for all emailers, but its better than 85 for readability. 
72 allow for 8 char to be put in front for quotes ("> > > > ").

Another trouble is mailers like mozilla (at least it used to be) that
based the margin on the size of the window at the time you click send. 
That had me sending some goofy email for a while.



> 
> Rob
> 
> 
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-- 
Zot O'Connor

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