[Coco] Formatting (was: PAL, GAL, CPLD Programmer Needed)

[John E. Malmberg]

On 8/13/2012 8:38 PM, Kip Koon wrote:
>
> P.S. Why does this list ad extra CR, LF sequences after every paragraph I
> write in emails to the Coco List?

It is not.  You are using Microsoft Outlook 14.0 according to the 
message headers of this message.

X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook 14.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

This link will explain what should be happening, and several of the 
things that are happening and should not be.

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2646.txt

Basically it seems that only the text based mail/news clients run from 
"shell" accounts compose and display plain-text ASCII messages in 
conformance to the standard.

Some Microsoft Outlook variants send quoted printable instead of 
plain-text, and since Outlook also tends to automatically substitute 
special characters for several common ASCII punctuation characters, 
those messages also show up garbled on plain text readers.

You may have better luck with plain-text by switching to a Thunderbird 
as a news/mail client.

This list can also be accessed as the news-group 
gmane.comp.hardware.tandy.coco on news.gmane.org news server.

However with Thunderbird, when you set it to plain-text also sets it to 
format-flowed, and does not provide a control to disable this.  The 
plain-text editor in Thunderbird does not display-format flowed in the 
same way as the reader does, so what you type may not be what you see.

Particularly if you are trained as a touch typist on a real typewriter 
and are use to hitting the return key at the end of lines to do manual 
line wraps of text.  These extra returns are invisible to the composer, 
but look really bad on the receiving side.

A bug about this was filed with Mozilla before they split it into 
Firefox and Thunderbird, but the then maintainer of the plain-text 
editor responded that as far as he was concerned everyone should be 
using HTML, so he did not see the point in fixing issues with the 
plain-text editors.  Others took exception to that, but essentially 
while there has been some discussion on the bug, no action has been 
taken in about a decade.

Regards
-John
wb8tyw at qsl.network
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