wrapping lines

[Joseph Rosevear]

Hello all,

I posted a reply to Harold Johanssen's post about a tool to encrypt/
decrypt the contents of a directory recursively. Or I tried to post a
reply, anyway. It was oddly embarassing.

When I viewed my post I found that it didn't look right. So I tried
again, and again. It seems I didn't understand how to use the Pan
newsreader. I expected a newline to be treated as a newline, but
apparently Pan doesn't work that way. Oddly, newlines can be ignored at
the viewers discretion (toggle "view; body pane; wrap article"). I
wonder, do all newsreaders work that way?

Anyway, it was a frustration for me, as I wanted to give some lines
showing a script and some other lines showing what the user should type.
They didn't display as individual lines when the article was viewed with
"wrap article" selected. Sigh.

I think that is called "Error between keyboard and chair".

-Joe

[Henrik Carlqvist]

Post by Joseph Rosevear
When I viewed my post I found that it didn't look right. So I tried
again, and again. It seems I didn't understand how to use the Pan
newsreader. I expected a newline to be treated as a newline, but
apparently Pan doesn't work that way. Oddly, newlines can be ignored at
the viewers discretion (toggle "view; body pane; wrap article"). I
wonder, do all newsreaders work that way?

As you say, pan has the option "View", "Body Pane", "Wrap Article Body"
which can be toggled with the W switch. If you leave that option
unchecked the articles will look exactly as the author intended.

Some clueless authors post messages with lines longer than 80 characters.
As those people do not know how to insert newlines in the messages the
"Wrap Article Body" option quickly toggled with "W" will ignore their
failed attempts to use newlines and instead reformat the message to easy
to read lines no longer than 80 characters. However, as most people do
post good looking messages it is mostly best to have the option disabled.

Your messages did look fine. When posting messages there is an option
"Edit", "Wrap Text" which when checked will make sure that no lines get
too long. It is a good idea to allways have that checked.

regards Henrik