CWatts@BNR.CA (Carl Watts) (05/21/91)
Several people now have sent me comments about the long lines in my postings (like the NewsReader in Smalltalk) that appear mangled with split words and inserted lines. These problems are caused by bugs in the Usenet message transfers agents (like inews) that transfer messages between NewsServers. Different ones impose different abitrary limits on the length of lines they transfer and this causes them to split words/lines/paragraphs by inserting additional carriage returns in the most unfortunate places. When these bugs are fixed, the message transfer agents will handle standard ASCII files properly, without the need to insert arbitrary word/character wrapping during transfer. It should be entirely the responsiblity of the tool showing you news messages to properly word-wrap them for display given the size of the window/screen it has available to show them to you. Those of us raised on word processors (not typewriters) only type Returns at the end of paragraphs. And my messages will be somewhat mangled by the news transfer agents until they get those bugs fixed. For those using my NewsReader (or even other newsreaders) who want to be more accomodating to these bugs in the usenet software but who don't want to have to remember to type Return every 72 characters, you can pipe your posted message through 'fmt' before it goes to 'inews'. This will wordwrap your file to some LCLL (lowest common linelength) like 72 characters. Just modify NewsReader postMessageText:from: to say: UnixProcess cshOne: 'fmt -s "', fileName asString, '" | inews' Of course this is almost just as bad as what the news servers do, but fmt will word-wrap not character-wrap and will only do it once. The news servers can character-wrap several times at abitrary points leaving you're text completely mangled. Even this way you have to be careful when running source code through fmt since it can insert a carriage return in a String literal. Its much better to fix the bugs rather than bastardizing other software to accomodate the bugs.
scotte@applix.com (Scott Evernden) (05/22/91)
In article <1991May21.151653.22354@bqnes74.bnr.ca> CWatts@BNR.CA (Carl Watts) writes: >Several people now have sent me comments about the long lines in my postings (like the NewsReader in Smalltalk) that appear mangled with split words and inserted lines. > >These problems are caused by bugs in the Usenet message transfers agents (like inews) that transfer messages between NewsServers. Different ones impose different abitrary limits on the length of lines they transfer and this causes them to split words/lines/paragraphs by inserting additional carriage returns in the most unfortunate places. > Would you please cause your NewsPoster to insert the word "longlines" into the subject header, so I can "kill" these messages until such time as every news-site is repaired to your specifications? -scott
joeb@hpnmdla.sr.hp.com (Joe Barnhart) (05/22/91)
You seem to be saying, "the problem isn't with MY code, it's with YOUR newsreader." I don't think your Smalltalk Notes Browser (or whatever you name it) will be very popular if, every time someone uses it, they have to send a message like yours explaining that the problem is with the recipient's software. Isn't is it simpler just to fix the problem by modifying the ST code? -- Joe B.