[kde-linux] OT: email drafting (was:Re: KWrite/printer problem)

[Bruce Miller]

Reply bottom-posted.
--
Bruce Miller, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
bruce at brmiller.ca; (613) 745-1151


No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets.



----- Original Message ----
> From: david <gnome at hawaii.rr.com>
> To: kde-linux <kde-linux at kde.org>
> Sent: Thu, October 8, 2009 7:31:46 AM
> Subject: Re: [kde-linux] KWrite/printer problem
> 

   ... <snip>

> >> Conclusion: Bruce's mail software doesn't send paragraphs wrapped
> >> properly. ;-)
> >>
> > Really?  It looks fine here.
> 
> After I told Icedove here to wrap the lines - it wrapped his entire post 
> (originally just 4 long single paragraphs, each a single line) into a 
> single block of text. His mail software has characteristics of MS Outlook.
> 
> There's reasons why the email convention is to have blank lines between 
> paragraphs. ;-)

David,

Ouch.

By
the standards of mailing lists, your suggestion that my "mail software
has characteristics of MS Outlook" is moderately worded. Thank you. But
this is a Linux mailing list and the comment makes me feel a little
like a card-carrying Republican (God forbid!) whose idea at a
Republican policy gathering gets a reaction of "that smacks of liberal
thinking." Hint: it is only in the USA and nowhere else in the world,
that the word liberal is a pejorative term.

Allow me to reassure
all on this mailing list (I already sent this to you off-list) that I
currently use the Yahoo! Webmail client. I routinely draft messages of
more than a couple of lines (including, btw, this one) in gvim and
copy/paste them to the Webmail client. Moreover, I do not currently
have a working Windows installation in my house and go to considerable
length to avoid using Outlook when I am outside the house. 

From
my perspective, the use of gvim (or any flavour of vim) + client allows
me to ensure that messages go out with long "single-line" paragraphs.
Far from being a bug, this is precisely a feature that I want.

I am admittedly a
grammar- and form- "Nazi" and
badly word-wrapped text (like this
paragraph intentionally is) drives me crazy. As a result, I tend to think less of the
ideas
of a writer who allows this to
happen to
his
(or her) messages.

There is a clash of conventions here. Generally accepted writing convention (not just e-mail) is to increase the "leading" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leading)
between paragraphs, but not to alter it for items in a numbered list.
It is a hold-over from the days of the typewriter to achieve the
increased inter-paragraph leading by "double-spacing." A numbered list
is not normally considered separate paragraphs. IIRC, and my memory of
mark-up languages is very rusty, HTML, XML, their parent SGML, and
their many siblings and cousins use a different end-of-line marker at
the end of items in a numbered list from the end a paragraph. However,
plain ASCII text treats any newline as a paragraph delimiter. I thus
end up having to rely on the word-wrap algorithms of my recipients'
e-mail clients to render plain-text messages in the same manner as I
sent them.

When it is essential that a text have exactly the
same physical appearance as the writer originally wrote, it is time to
turn to PDF. But that takes us beyond the scope of RFC-822 compliant
e-mail.

We have wandered far off the topic of printer problems
with KDE4, kwrite and Konqueror. If you agree, could we take further
discussion of this matter off the list?

Best wishes
Bruce