Need help in choosing a newsreader

[Anton Shepelev]

Hello all,

I need to find a newsreader that:

a. Works under Windows (XP and up),

b. Is GUI-based, not like rn, trn and so on,

c. Can supports a Russian 8-bit encoding not only
in article body but also in the Subject head-
er.

I was quite amazed to find out that neither
XNews nor Outlook Express are capable of post-
ing articles with titles in Russian corectly.
They come out as sequesnces of quesion marks,
one per symbol, no matter what encoding is
chosen. Of course, I might have failed to
confugure them properly, in which case advice
will be welcome.

Could you please recommend to me such a reader?

Anton

P.S.: I had also posted this to
alt.comp.software.newsreaders only to find
that that group is almost dead...

[Poutnik]

In article <jncak8$cla$2...@dont-email.me>, anto...@gmail.com says...

>
> Hello all,
>
> I need to find a newsreader that:
>
> a. Works under Windows (XP and up),
>
> b. Is GUI-based, not like rn, trn and so on,
>
> c. Can supports a Russian 8-bit encoding not only
> in article body but also in the Subject head-
> er.
>
> I was quite amazed to find out that neither
> XNews nor Outlook Express are capable of post-
> ing articles with titles in Russian corectly.
> They come out as sequesnces of quesion marks,
> one per symbol, no matter what encoding is
> chosen. Of course, I might have failed to
> confugure them properly, in which case advice
> will be welcome.
>

hmm, I like my Gravity,

http://mpgravity.sourceforge.net/

but I doubt about correct Russian displaying. But worth to try.

What about email/usenet client ThunderBird ?
http://www.mozilla.org/cs/thunderbird/

I suppose it may is not as good as dedicated newsreader,
but OTOH it can be better in cyrilic ......


--
Poutnik

[Anton Shepelev]

Poutnik:

> hmm, I like my Gravity,
> http://mpgravity.sourceforge.net/

Couldn't make it work with subjects in Russian...

> What about email/usenet client ThunderBird ?
> http://www.mozilla.org/cs/thunderbird/

> I suppose it may is not as good as dedicated news-

> reader, but OTOH it can be better in cyrilic

Will try it.

Anton

[Gene E. Bloch]

On 4/26/2012, Anton Shepelev posted:

I use MesNews now and have used 40Tude Dialog in the past (I
a;alternate between them every 6 or 12 months). I think it's this one,
MesNews, that does OK in reading Cyrillic (body and headers), but it
might be Dialog - I haven't checked recently.

http://www.mesnews.net

I had this address for dialog:
http://www.40tude.com/dialog/
but it's dead at the moment, so try

http://40tude-dialog.en.softonic.com/

or else Google for 40Tude Dialog.

--
Gene E. Bloch (Stumbling Bloch)

[tlvp]

On Thu, 26 Apr 2012 15:45:45 -0700, Gene E. Bloch wrote:

> On 4/26/2012, Anton Shepelev posted:
>> Hello all,
>
>> I need to find a newsreader that:

>> ...

>> c. Can supports a Russian 8-bit encoding not only

>> in article body but also in the Subject ...

>
> I had this address for dialog:
> http://www.40tude.com/dialog/
> but it's dead at the moment, so try
>
> http://40tude-dialog.en.softonic.com/
>
> or else Google for 40Tude Dialog.

I was meaning to suggest dialogue, too, at

http://www.40tude.com/dialog/download.htm
and
http://www.40tude.com/files/4d2b38.exe

or

http://dialog.datalist.org/downloads/dialog.84.zip
and
http://dialog.datalist.org/downloads/4d2b38.zip

(where I got my installation files).

Maybe Bernd Rose will bring in an uptodate URL if these are truly dead.

Cheers, -- tlvp
--
Avant de repondre, jeter la poubelle, SVP.

[Ted S.]

On Thu, 26 Apr 2012 20:19:20 +0000 (UTC), Anton Shepelev wrote:

> c. Can supports a Russian 8-bit encoding not only
> in article body but also in the Subject head-
> er.

Я употребляю Dialog.

--
Ted S.
fedya at hughes dot net
Now blogging at http://justacineast.blogspot.com

[David H. Lipman]

From: "Ted S." <fe...@hughes.spam>

Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-5"
User-Agent: 40tude_Dialog/2.0.15.1 Hamster/2.1.0.11

Looks good!

--
Dave
Multi-AV Scanning Tool - http://multi-av.thespykiller.co.uk
http://www.pctipp.ch/downloads/dl/35905.asp

[XS11E]

anto...@gmail.com (Anton Shepelev) wrote:

> I was quite amazed to find out that neither XNews nor Outlook

> Express are capable of posting articles with titles in Russian
> corectly.

Have you investigated Mime Proxy? I don't know if it handles Russian
or not.

Patrick would know, he shows up here from time to time.

http://www.lamaiziere.net/mp_pagen.html


--
XS11E, Killing all posts from Google Groups
The Usenet Improvement Project:
http://twovoyagers.com/improve-usenet.org/

[Gene E. Bloch]

On 4/26/2012, tlvp posted:

Thankee

[Ivan Shmakov]

>>>>> Anton Shepelev <anto...@gmail.com> writes:

[…]

> b. Is GUI-based, not like rn, trn and so on,

I wonder, why would it matter?

--cut: news:b08bcl$fvq$2...@wagner.wagner.home --
ID>> Та. Все таки в консоли как-то удобнее читать. Или я не прав?

AT>> чем удобнее?
ID>> Привычнее как-то. И все под рукой.

AT> а что не "под рукой" в иксах?

Не в иксах, а в читалках ньюсов с графическим интерфейсом.

Не то, чтобы я туда внимательно смотрел, но обычно там нету
а) вызова привычного редактора для написания ответа
б) обработки группы сообщений посредством внешней программы
(а это и есть - все утилиты обработки текстов Unix под рукой)

Поэтому и пускаю tin в xterm-е
--cut: news:b08bcl$fvq$2...@wagner.wagner.home --

(Summary in English: GUI-based newsreaders typically don't allow
the use of an external editor, and neither allow the articles to
be piped via an external program.)

(Not that I'd advocate for Trn or Tin.)

[…]

--
FSF associate member #7257

[Gene E. Bloch]

On 4/26/2012, Ted S. posted:

> On Thu, 26 Apr 2012 20:19:20 +0000 (UTC), Anton Shepelev wrote:

>> c. Can supports a Russian 8-bit encoding not only
>> in article body but also in the Subject head-
>> er.

> Я употребляю Dialog.

The subject was all question marks until I opened the post.

The two Russian words in your post showed up in Cyrillic and the
subject now is showing Cyrillic too. Oddly, David H. Lipman's subject
showed up as all question marks until I opened your post, when it also
switched to Cyrillic.

I probably wasn't looking at the right moment - I suspect what I think
I saw is not what actually happened :-)

MesNews here.

[Gene E. Bloch]

On 4/26/2012, Gene E. Bloch posted:

But my reply showed up with question marks in the subject, and they
never changed. Probably the reply lost the appropriate header, but I
won't look 'cause I don't know what to look for :-)

[Ivan Shmakov]

>>>>> Gene E Bloch <bloc...@someplace.invalid> writes:
>>>>> On 4/26/2012, Ted S. posted:
>>>>> On Thu, 26 Apr 2012 20:19:20 +0000 (UTC), Anton Shepelev wrote:

>>> c. Can supports a Russian 8-bit encoding not only in article body

>>> but also in the Subject header.

>> Я употребляю Dialog.

> The subject was all question marks until I opened the post.

The original article's header reads:

--cut: news:swplgbg9rvvb$.d...@justacineast.motzarella.org --
Subject: =?iso-8859-5?Q?=BF=DE=DC=DE=E9=EC_(=D1=EB=D2=E8=D8=D9=3A_Re=3A?=
=?iso-8859-5?Q?_Need_help_in_choosing_a_newsreader_(was=3A_Need?=
=?iso-8859-5?Q?_help_in_choosing_a_newsreader)?=
--cut: news:swplgbg9rvvb$.d...@justacineast.motzarella.org --

Which is, AIUI, the correct encoding for the non-ASCII header
content as per RFC 2047.

Apparently, the newsreader software used to post the reply
(news:9vulac...@mid.individual.net) got it screwed.

[Anton Shepelev]

Ted S.:

> > c. Can supports a Russian 8-bit encoding not

> > only in article body but also in the Sub-
> > ject header.
>
> Я употребляю Dialog.

Thanks you, Ted. It works for me, too.

Anton

[Anton Shepelev]

Gene E. Bloch:

> But my reply showed up with question marks in the

> subject, and they never changed. Probably the re-

> ply lost the appropriate header, but I won't look
> 'cause I don't know what to look for :-)

In your message, the Subject header physically con-
tains question marks, while the correct header looks
this way:

Subject: =?iso-8859-5?Q?=BF=DE=DC=DE=E9=EC_(=D1=EB=D2=E8=D8=D9=3A_Re=3A?=
=?iso-8859-5?Q?_Need_help_in_choosing_a_newsreader_(was=3A_Need?=
=?iso-8859-5?Q?_help_in_choosing_a_newsreader)?=

The encoding is specified in the Subject itself, as
per the MIME standard, but not all newsreaders care
to implement it and get away with replacing all non-
ASCII symbols with question marks.

Anton

[John F. Morse]

Ivan Shmakov <onei...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > b. Is GUI-based, not like rn, trn and so on,
>
> I wonder, why would it matter?
>

Reverse mattering might be for netnews over ssh from a remote computer
running a CLI (text) newsreader like nn, rn, slrn, trn, tin, -- even gnus.


--
John

When a person has -- whether they knew it or not -- already
rejected the Truth, by what means do they discern a lie?

[Gene E. Bloch]

On 4/27/2012, Anton Shepelev posted:

Basically, it looks to me like MesNews is inconsistent in how it
handles headers in posts and replies.

In MesNews, I replied to a post showing a Cyrillic subject, yet my
reply got question marks in the subject. Oddly enough, the Cyrillic
text in the message body remained intact.

MesNews has been at version 1.8.3.0 for a couple of years, I think, so
I'm guessing development is not continuing. (The date on my installer
file is the date of this computer, about a year ago, but MesNews
1.8.3.0 was old then, IIRC.)

Maybe I'll go back to Dialog soon :-)

[Shmuel Metz]

In <9vulg0...@mid.individual.net>, on 04/26/2012

at 09:26 PM, Gene E. Bloch <bloc...@someplace.invalid> said:

>But my reply showed up with question marks in the subject, and they
>never changed. Probably the reply lost the appropriate header,

There is no header field to control the encoding of header fields.
Several earlier articles had RFC 2047 encoding of the Subject field.

--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT <http://patriot.net/~shmuel>

Unsolicited bulk E-mail subject to legal action. I reserve the
right to publicly post or ridicule any abusive E-mail. Reply to
domain Patriot dot net user shmuel+news to contact me. Do not
reply to spam...@library.lspace.org

[Shmuel Metz]

In <9vulac...@mid.individual.net>, on 04/26/2012

at 09:23 PM, Gene E. Bloch <bloc...@someplace.invalid> said:

>The subject was all question marks until I opened the post.

That probably means that MesNews does not handle RFC 2047 encoding in
OVERVIEW fields. Both Ted and David had what looked to be correct
encoding of the Subject for ISO-8859-5.

[Shmuel Metz]

In <guSdnXt5_Yu9bATS...@giganews.com>, on 04/26/2012
at 09:06 PM, "David H. Lipman" <DLipman~nospam~@Verizon.Net> said:

>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-5"

That takes care of the body. For correct headers containing non-ASCII,
use RFC 2047 encoding.

[Mike Yetto]

Ted S. <fe...@hughes.spam> writes and having writ moves on.

>On Thu, 26 Apr 2012 20:19:20 +0000 (UTC), Anton Shepelev wrote:

>> c. Can supports a Russian 8-bit encoding not only
>> in article body but also in the Subject head-
>> er.

>Я употребляю Dialog.

In the For-What-It's-Worth Department, slrn doesn't seem to have
any problem, nor does gvim.

Mike "unless it pulls a Gene and Blochs it from the server" Yetto
--
In theory, theory and practice are the same.
In practice they are not.

[Gene E. Bloch]

On 4/27/2012, Mike Yetto posted:

> Ted S. <fe...@hughes.spam> writes and having writ moves on.
>> On Thu, 26 Apr 2012 20:19:20 +0000 (UTC), Anton Shepelev wrote:

>>> c. Can supports a Russian 8-bit encoding not only
>>> in article body but also in the Subject head-
>>> er.

>> Я употребляю Dialog.

> In the For-What-It's-Worth Department, slrn doesn't seem to have
> any problem, nor does gvim.

> Mike "unless it pulls a Gene and Blochs it from the server" Yetto

How did you Stumble onto that idea?

Yetto nother misuse of my name :-)

Gene "No offense intended (this time)" Bloch

[tlvp]

YVW (though I'm in the dark as to for what :-) ). -- tlvp

[Anton Shepelev]

Ivan Shmakov:

> > b. Is GUI-based, not like rn, trn and so on,
>
> I wonder, why would it matter?

It's just because I want to make my colleagues mi-
grate to a local Usenet group instead of the bloated
web-based corporate portal which I hate. GUI-based
newsreaders will cause then less alienation for they
are all Windows users, and if some of them have seen
Linux, it was only from its GUI-side.

I don't even no how to dissuade them from using HTML
in email. It is not only incompatible with good
email clients but also looks plumb ugly, when formed
using Outlook's editor.

> (Summary in English: GUI-based newsreaders typi-

> cally don't allow the use of an external editor,
> and neither allow the articles to be piped via an
> external program.)
>
> (Not that I'd advocate for Trn or Tin.)

I use troff to format my messages. In vim I have
macro that formats the text right inside the editor,
while in Sylpheed (or any other GUI-based newsread-
er) I have to copy-pased formatted text into the in-
ternal editor.

But I wonder, how does one process a set of articles
using standard POSIX tools from within, say, Tin?

Anton

[Anton Shepelev]

Anton Shepelev:

> I was quite amazed to find out that neither XNews

> nor Outlook Express are capable of posting arti-

> cles with titles in Russian corectly. They come

> out as sequesnces of quesion marks, one per sym-

> bol, no matter what encoding is chosen. Of
> course, I might have failed to confugure them
> properly, in which case advice will be welcome.

A colleagie of mine has found how to enable it in
Outlook, but I still can't do it in XNews, which is
otherwise so much more preferable, so hereby I ask
Luu Tran and everybody else who can help me, to let
me know if XNews implements RFC 2047.

If it does not, then I'd like to make a correspond-
ing feature request.

Anton

P.S.: Thanks for the great newsreader Luu. It was
XNews through which I first entered Usenet in
my university days, when I still had Win98SE
and a dial-up connection and needed to consult
the LaTeX gurus at a fido7 group, because ev-
erybody else was doing their diplomas in Word
and I had said to myself: enough of this mis-
ery! I'm gonna do my diploma in LaTeX.

I remember the girls reacting funny to my
proposing: "Let's write our diplomas in La-
TeX!"

[Stan Brown]

On Thu, 26 Apr 2012 22:27:58 +0200, Poutnik wrote:
> hmm, I like my Gravity,
>
> http://mpgravity.sourceforge.net/
>

That's what I use too, but every day I grow more irritated at it for
breaking up quoted lines incorrectly and for breaking up lines when I
forward an article via email. Maybe I should give Thunderbird a try,
since I have it installed already for email.

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com
Shikata ga nai...

[Anton Shepelev]

Sqwertz:

> Stan Brown:

>
> > That's what I use too, but every day I grow more

> > irritated at it for breaking up quoted lines in-
> > correctly and for breaking up lines when I for-
> > ward an article via email.
>
> Oh, but don't worry. That should be the recipi-
> ents responsibility to fix your broken URL's with
> OUR URL-fixing newsreaders and MUA's. It's the
> not senders problem.

An article is written once, but read many times.
Therefore, it is the author who should take utmost
care to produce a well-formatted message.

I don't rely on newsreaders' built-in formatting
tools because they rarely do what I want.

Anton

[Stephen Wolstenholme]

On Thu, 26 Apr 2012 20:19:20 +0000 (UTC), anto...@gmail.com (Anton
Shepelev) wrote:

>Hello all,
>
>I need to find a newsreader that:
>

> a. Works under Windows (XP and up),
>

> b. Is GUI-based, not like rn, trn and so on,
>

> c. Can supports a Russian 8-bit encoding not only

> in article body but also in the Subject head-
> er.

>
> I was quite amazed to find out that neither

> XNews nor Outlook Express are capable of post-
> ing articles with titles in Russian corectly.

> They come out as sequesnces of quesion marks,

> one per symbol, no matter what encoding is

> chosen. Of course, I might have failed to
> confugure them properly, in which case advice
> will be welcome.
>

>Could you please recommend to me such a reader?
>
>Anton
>
>P.S.: I had also posted this to
> alt.comp.software.newsreaders only to find
> that that group is almost dead...

I think Forte Agent can be configured to do what you want.

Steve

--
Neural Network Software. http://www.npsl1.com
EasyNN-plus. Neural Networks plus. http://www.easynn.com
SwingNN. Forecast with Neural Networks. http://www.swingnn.com
JustNN. Just Neural Networks. http://www.justnn.com

[XS11E]

Anton Shepelev <anton.txt@g{oogle}mail.com> wrote:

> It's just because I want to make my colleagues mi-
> grate to a local Usenet group instead of the bloated
> web-based corporate portal which I hate. GUI-based
> newsreaders will cause then less alienation for they
> are all Windows users,

At risk of being lynched by the mob here, your best choice is Outlook
Express (if they're using Windows XP or earlier) with OE QuoteFix
added. It's a familiar GUI, they've already got it and should be able
to learn it very quickly. If they're using a non-obsolete OS such as
Vista or Windows7 I have no recommendation as installing OE on later
OS's is not difficult but beyond the capabilities of most non-geeks.

> I don't even no how to dissuade them from using HTML
> in email. It is not only incompatible with good
> email clients but also looks plumb ugly, when formed
> using Outlook's editor.

I gave up on that. There comes a time when, if everyone insists on
rude behavior, you can only cease to correct them. Notice that the
formerly unthinkable F-bomb is now a part of normal speach for many?
Times change. I suppose it's necessary to change with them?

[Mike Easter]

XS11E wrote:

> Anton Shepelev wrote:
>
>> It's just because I want to make my colleagues mi-
>> grate to a local Usenet group instead of the bloated
>> web-based corporate portal which I hate. GUI-based
>> newsreaders will cause then less alienation for they
>> are all Windows users,
>
> At risk of being lynched by the mob here, your best choice is
> Outlook Express (if they're using Windows XP or earlier) with OE
> QuoteFix added. It's a familiar GUI, they've already got it and
> should be able to learn it very quickly. If they're using a
> non-obsolete OS such as Vista or Windows7 I have no recommendation as
> installing OE on later OS's is not difficult but beyond the
> capabilities of most non-geeks.

Possibilities for those colleagues

XP: OE with QuoteFix, but there are problems with SP2+ and quotefix -
<jain> Furthermore, SP2 makes changes in OE's Read all messages in plain
text feature. Instead of using an IE control, it now uses the RichEdit
control. OE-QuoteFix' Viewing features will not function at all if you
enable the plain text feature in OE under [Tools | Options | Read].
</jain> http://home.in.tum.de/~jain/software/oe-quotefix/docs/usage.html

Vista: Windows Mail works OK pretty much like OE

Win7: Figure out how to install 'reactivate' Vista's WinMail or find an
old v. of Win LiveMail which can quote; VistaWinMail is probably a
better choice than the old LiveMail, or go to some 3rd party which is
popular with ex-OE users such as Tbird

--
Mike Easter

[Nil]

On 28 Apr 2012, XS11E <xs1...@SPAMyahoo.com> wrote in
news.software.readers:

> At risk of being lynched by the mob here, your best choice is
> Outlook Express (if they're using Windows XP or earlier) with OE
> QuoteFix added. It's a familiar GUI, they've already got it and
> should be able to learn it very quickly. If they're using a
> non-obsolete OS such as Vista or Windows7 I have no recommendation
> as installing OE on later OS's is not difficult but beyond the
> capabilities of most non-geeks.

If you really do know how to install OE in Vista or Win7, please spill
the beans. Many people (but not me) would like to do so, many people
have tried, and as far as I know, have not succeeded. The closest I
know of is to install it in a copy of of a older OS running in a
virtual computer.

[Mike Easter]

Nil wrote:
> XS11E

>> installing OE on later OS's is not difficult but beyond the
>> capabilities of most non-geeks.
>
> If you really do know how to install OE in Vista or Win7, please
> spill the beans. Many people (but not me) would like to do so, many
> people have tried, and as far as I know, have not succeeded. The
> closest I know of is to install it in a copy of of a older OS running
> in a virtual computer.

The differences between OE and Vista's WinMail are not too great.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_mail Differences from Outlook
Express - New features ... Removed features ...

The difficulties installing/reactivating WinMail in Win7 are also not
too great (so I read, I have no Win7).



--
Mike Easter

[Anton Shepelev]

Anton Shepelev:

> A colleagie of mine has found how to enable it in
> Outlook, but I still can't do it in XNews, which
> is otherwise so much more preferable, so hereby I
> ask Luu Tran and everybody else who can help me,
> to let me know if XNews implements RFC 2047.

MIME Proxy's homepage states that XNews, indeed, has
no support for that.

Anton

[Anton Shepelev]

XS11E:

> At risk of being lynched by the mob here, your
> best choice is Outlook Express (if they're using
> Windows XP or earlier) with OE QuoteFix added.
> It's a familiar GUI, they've already got it and
> should be able to learn it very quickly. If
> they're using a non-obsolete OS such as Vista or
> Windows7 I have no recommendation as installing OE

> on later OS's is not difficult but beyond the ca-
> pabilities of most non-geeks.

Didn't know about this QuoteFix thing, thanks. What
a shame that Outlook is unable not to top-post with-
out hacking.

> > I don't even no how to dissuade them from using
> > HTML in email. It is not only incompatible with
> > good email clients but also looks plumb ugly,
> > when formed using Outlook's editor.
>
> I gave up on that. There comes a time when, if
> everyone insists on rude behavior, you can only
> cease to correct them. Notice that the formerly
> unthinkable F-bomb is now a part of normal speach
> for many? Times change. I suppose it's necessary
> to change with them?

That won't do for me, so I'll appreciate help from
someone with the same convictions as mine but more
eloquent. Ecologically clean ways of communication
like Usenet are so obviously better than bloated fo-
rums or ugly HTML e-mail that I am at a loss with
loss when asked to prove my point.

Anton

[Nil]

On 28 Apr 2012, Mike Easter <Mi...@ster.invalid> wrote in
news.software.readers:

> The differences between OE and Vista's WinMail are not too great.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_mail Differences from
> Outlook Express - New features ... Removed features ...

Apparently not, but some people were devoted to OE and still want it.
And I believe the Quotefix only works with OE and not Windows Mail or
Windows Live Mail. Certainly messages created by OE+Quotefix are a
whole lot less broken than those from WLM.

> The difficulties installing/reactivating WinMail in Win7 are also
> not too great (so I read, I have no Win7).

It's not that difficult, but it's fragile and tends to get broken by
Windows Updates. I think it's a losing battle.

[tlvp]

On Sat, 28 Apr 2012 16:02:06 -0400, Nil wrote:

> On 28 Apr 2012, XS11E <xs1...@SPAMyahoo.com> wrote in
> news.software.readers:
>
>> At risk of being lynched by the mob here, your best choice is
>> Outlook Express (if they're using Windows XP or earlier)

Then there are those of us who avoid both OE and Outlook proper like the
plague. For us there's Thunderbird or SeaMonkey, in the Mozilla camp,
there's Opera Mail & News in the Opera camp, there's 40tude Dialog in the
Bernd Rose camp, and many more (MesNews, Agent, Pan, ... ), all free.

>> ... with OE

>> QuoteFix added. It's a familiar GUI, they've already got it and
>> should be able to learn it very quickly. If they're using a
>> non-obsolete OS such as Vista or Windows7 I have no recommendation
>> as installing OE on later OS's is not difficult but beyond the
>> capabilities of most non-geeks.
>
> If you really do know how to install OE in Vista or Win7, please spill

Not that I know, but I have read that, in the sorts of Win 7 that include
an XP Mode, you just install OE in XP the way XP always installs OE.

In Vista, I understand folks use VirtualBox to install an OE-bearing
instance of XP (which may be more or less the same as what 7 does).

> the beans. Many people (but not me) would like to do so, many people
> have tried, and as far as I know, have not succeeded. The closest I
> know of is to install it in a copy of of a older OS running in a
> virtual computer.

Yes; in a nutshell, that's my understanding, too. Cheers, -- tlvp

[Gene E. Bloch]

On 4/27/2012, tlvp posted:

Rereading my posts and your replies, I'm in the dark too :-)

I see that I posted it at 21:17 my time. Possibly I was asleep but
didn't realize it.

Maybe I answered the wrong post...

[Mike Easter]

Nil wrote:
> Mike Easter

>> The differences between OE and Vista's WinMail are not too great.

> Apparently not, but some people were devoted to OE and still want it.

Running OE in Vista or Win7 natively is unrealistic.

> And I believe the Quotefix only works with OE and not Windows Mail or
> Windows Live Mail. Certainly messages created by OE+Quotefix are a
> whole lot less broken than those from WLM.

The normal versions of WLM are not satisfactory for usenet because it
can't quote at all.

The problem of how lines get broken badly is not peculiar to OE.

Ideally everyone would have a properly functioning format=flowed client.
WinMail can format=flowed better than some clients and worse than others.

>> The difficulties installing/reactivating WinMail in Win7 are also
>> not too great (so I read, I have no Win7).
>
> It's not that difficult, but it's fragile and tends to get broken by
> Windows Updates. I think it's a losing battle.

Correct. OE was never a good client, but was very popular; and there
were so many fixes for it; not just QF, but also yProxy,
Nfilter/NewsProxy, and SpamPal to help it with various weaknesses.

With sufficient 3rd party 'patches' it wasn't so bad.


--
Mike Easter

[XS11E]

tlvp <mPiOsUcB...@att.net> wrote:

>> On 28 Apr 2012, XS11E <xs1...@SPAMyahoo.com> wrote in
>> news.software.readers:
>>
>>> At risk of being lynched by the mob here, your best choice is
>>> Outlook Express (if they're using Windows XP or earlier)
>
> Then there are those of us who avoid both OE and Outlook proper
> like the plague. For us there's Thunderbird or SeaMonkey, in the
> Mozilla camp,

I agree but the OP was looking for something familiar to users. BTW, I
rate T'belch as an OK email client and as the ONLY newsreader actually
worse than OE!

[XS11E]

Mike Easter <Mi...@ster.invalid> wrote:

> Correct. OE was never a good client, but was very popular;

But remember, we're not looking for either good or popular, we're
looking for something that users can feel familiar and use w/o much of
a learning curve.

With OE they can dive right into news groups, top posting, mis-quoting,
asking the same question that was asked and answered just 5 minutes
ago.... In other words, behaving just like OE users. Those who can
stand the unfriendly fire from hundreds of flame throwers, they'll
learn to use Usenet (maybe?) and then they can start looking for a
better client.

[Stan Brown]

On Sat, 28 Apr 2012 17:28:01 +0400, Anton Shepelev wrote:
>
> Sqwertz:
>
> > Stan Brown:
> >
> > > That's what I use too, but every day I grow more
> > > irritated at it for breaking up quoted lines in-
> > > correctly and for breaking up lines when I for-
> > > ward an article via email.
> >
> > Oh, but don't worry. That should be the recipi-
> > ents responsibility to fix your broken URL's with
> > OUR URL-fixing newsreaders and MUA's. It's the
> > not senders problem.

That's the philosophy that gave us Windows Live Mail, and it's one
that I reject utterly.

In any case, I'm not talking just about quoted URLs, but
about all
quoted text. Quoted text should not be broken. One might
make an
argument for reflowing paragrpahs, but not for just
breaking
quoted lines in the annoying fashion of this paragraph. And
that is
what Gravity does. I've reported the bug multiple times, but
though
there have been additional versions, it never gets fixed.

> An article is written once, but read many times.
> Therefore, it is the author who should take utmost
> care to produce a well-formatted message.

That's my feeling also. It is the argument behind trimming quotes,
and behind posting right side up.

> I don't rely on newsreaders' built-in formatting
> tools because they rarely do what I want.

I don't know why newsreaders and email programs don't make it easy to
use your external editor of choice. Sure, let them have a default
editor for those who have no preference, but those of us who do have
a preference should be able to designate the editor we want to use.

[Mike Easter]

Stan Brown wrote:

> In any case, I'm not talking just about quoted URLs, but
> about all
> quoted text. Quoted text should not be broken. One might
> make an
> argument for reflowing paragrpahs, but not for just
> breaking
> quoted lines in the annoying fashion of this paragraph. And
> that is
> what Gravity does. I've reported the bug multiple times, but
> though
> there have been additional versions, it never gets fixed.


> In any case, I'm not talking just about quoted URLs, but about all
> quoted text. Quoted text should not be broken. One might make an
> argument for reflowing paragrpahs, but not for just breaking quoted
> lines in the annoying fashion of this paragraph. And that is what
> Gravity does. I've reported the bug multiple times, but though there
> have been additional versions, it never gets fixed.

(And) I have reported the problem with how Tb, which claims to be
format=flowed as well as stamping it in the header, fails to properly
and compliantly (there is an RFC) handle quoted f=f text numerous times
since Tb3 which is now at Tb 12, but nothing keeps happening on the
developers end, who are busily implementing new features.

Tb's redeeming quality in that regard is its ability to rewrap some
broken text such as yours above, but not others. Some broken text needs
a text cleanup tool or algorithm working in a separate editor with more
power.


--
Mike Easter

[tlvp]

On Sat, 28 Apr 2012 17:25:15 -0700, XS11E wrote:

> tlvp <mPiOsUcB...@att.net> wrote:
>
>>> On 28 Apr 2012, XS11E <xs1...@SPAMyahoo.com> wrote in
>>> news.software.readers:
>>>
>>>> At risk of being lynched by the mob here, your best choice is
>>>> Outlook Express (if they're using Windows XP or earlier)
>>
>> Then there are those of us who avoid both OE and Outlook proper
>> like the plague. For us there's Thunderbird or SeaMonkey, in the
>> Mozilla camp,
>
> I agree but the OP was looking for something familiar to users. BTW, I
> rate T'belch as an OK email client and as the ONLY newsreader actually
> worse than OE!

As you can see from my headers, I'm not using your T'b. And I certainly
wasn't rating it in any way ahead of the Opera, Dialog, Pan, Gravity,
MesNews, and other clients you chose to trim, as if the Mozilla clan were
(note the subjunctive, indicating something contrary to fact) some strong
preference of mine :-) .

BTW, does Eudora do Newsgroups? or only Mail? How about Mint? Emma?

[Ted S.]

On Sat, 28 Apr 2012 17:28:01 +0400, Anton Shepelev quoted sqwertz:

>> Oh, but don't worry. That should be the recipi-
>> ents responsibility to fix your broken URL's with
>> OUR URL-fixing newsreaders and MUA's. It's the
>> not senders problem.
>
> An article is written once, but read many times.
> Therefore, it is the author who should take utmost
> care to produce a well-formatted message.

Which you're failing to do by posting right-justified texts on Usenet
that include hyphenating words across line breaks. I find that
incredibly irritating to read. (The hyphenating more than the overshort
lines, which is also an irritant.)

--
Ted S.
fedya at hughes dot net
Now blogging at http://justacineast.blogspot.com

[Ivan Shmakov]

>>>>> Anton Shepelev <anton.txt@g{oogle}mail.com> writes:
>>>>> Ivan Shmakov:

>>> b. Is GUI-based, not like rn, trn and so on,

>> I wonder, why would it matter?

> It's just because I want to make my colleagues migrate to a local

> Usenet group instead of the bloated web-based corporate portal which
> I hate.

I wonder if an Atom (or RSS) feed capability, being added to
that portal, could resolve your issues?

I believe that there're even ways to convert such feeds into a
form acceptable by newsreaders. (E. g., http://gwene.org/ does
just that.)

> GUI-based newsreaders will cause then less alienation for they are
> all Windows users, and if some of them have seen Linux, it was only
> from its GUI-side.

> I don't even no how to dissuade them from using HTML in email. It is
> not only incompatible with good email clients but also looks plumb
> ugly, when formed using Outlook's editor.

While there're certainly many different ways to author “poor”
HTML, it doesn't mean that HTML by itself has to be avoided at
all costs for certain media, such as e-mail or news.

Actually, I tend advocate /for/ the use of HTML (or, rather,
XHTML) in e-mail in news, despite that my user agent of choice
has poor support for it. (And I think of it as an opportunity
to improve the latter.)

At the very least, it allows one to avoid such an ad-hockery as
/slashes/ /for/ /slanted/, and *stars* *for* *bold*. Not to
mention “proper” tables, formatted vs. “preformatted” text
distinction, and inline MathML formulae and SVG graphics.

>> (Summary in English: GUI-based newsreaders typically don't allow the

>> use of an external editor, and neither allow the articles to be
>> piped via an external program.)

>> (Not that I'd advocate for Trn or Tin.)

(Which, AFAIK, lack support for both RFC 2047 and MIME.)

> I use troff to format my messages. In vim I have macro that formats
> the text right inside the editor, while in Sylpheed (or any other

> GUI-based newsreader) I have to copy-pased formatted text into the
> internal editor.

BTW, I'm pretty sure that *roff can produce HTML just as well
these days. In particular, HTML is easier to “reflow” than the
hyphenated text *roff could also provide.

> But I wonder, how does one process a set of articles using standard
> POSIX tools from within, say, Tin?

I believe that the point was that it could process /any/ of the
articles, not necessarily a set of them in a batch. (Sorry if
my translation was incorrect in that regard.)

OTOH, in Gnus/Emacs, one can mark the articles of interest with
#, and then pipe them all (concatenated) via |.

--
FSF associate member #7257

[Whiskers]

On 2012-04-29, Stan Brown <the_sta...@fastmail.fm> wrote:
> On Sat, 28 Apr 2012 17:28:01 +0400, Anton Shepelev wrote:

[...]

> I don't know why newsreaders and email programs don't make it easy to
> use your external editor of choice. Sure, let them have a default
> editor for those who have no preference, but those of us who do have
> a preference should be able to designate the editor we want to use.

Both Sylpheed and Claws Mail allow the user to specify an external editor,
and should feel reasonably comfortable to Windows-users. (And they can do
usenet). Mahogany is probably worth a look too, but I haven't used it
myself so can't say how well it works.

--
-- ^^^^^^^^^^
-- Whiskers
-- ~~~~~~~~~~

[Mike Easter]

Whiskers wrote:

> Both Sylpheed and Claws Mail allow the user to specify an external
> editor, and should feel reasonably comfortable to Windows-users. (And
> they can do usenet). Mahogany is probably worth a look too, but I
> haven't used it myself so can't say how well it works.

I'm confused about Sylpheed. The last two linux sylpheeds I've seen
didn't have an option to create a new nntp account, just pop, imap,
gmail pop and gmail imap.

I don't recall which version that was; I'll have to research to figure
out which linux distro I booted up that the default client was sylpheed.
It might've been a Puppy Slacko 5.3.1 or it might've been a Swift
0.2.0 or both.


--
Mike Easter

[XS11E]

tlvp <mPiOsUcB...@att.net> wrote:

> On Sat, 28 Apr 2012 17:25:15 -0700, XS11E wrote:
>> I agree but the OP was looking for something familiar to users.
>> BTW, I rate T'belch as an OK email client and as the ONLY
>> newsreader actually worse than OE!
>
> As you can see from my headers, I'm not using your T'b.

Not my T'b.

[Anton Shepelev]

Mike Easter:

> I'm confused about Sylpheed. The last two linux

> sylpheeds I've seen didn't have an option to cre-

> ate a new nntp account, just pop, imap, gmail pop
> and gmail imap.

Oh, but it does. NNTP is missing from the New Ac-
count wizard, but if you open

Configuration -> Edit Accounts

and create a new account therefrom, you'll be alble
to choose NNTP from the Protocol drop-down list.
This inconsistency has been mentioned on the
Sylpheed mailing list and I think it is going to be
fixed.

I am using Sylpheed at work for both e-mail and
NNTP, and I hate Outlook for its agressive defaults:
RTF attachmets (winmail.dat) for internal (MS Ex-
change) e-mail and the pesky "Automatic removal of
unnecessary line breaks" that's killing all the for-
matting in my outgoing messages. Oh, and it even
uses proportional (non-monospace) fonts for plain-
text e-mail.

Anton

[Anton Shepelev]

John F. Morse:

> Anton Shepelev:

>
> > b. Is GUI-based, not like rn, trn and so on,
>

> Reverse mattering might be for netnews over ssh
> from a remote computer running a CLI (text) news-
> reader like nn, rn, slrn, trn, tin, -- even gnus.

I have tried it, following Leo Trotsky's principle
according to which to straighten a stick one must
(re)bend it in the other direction. This is why I'm
using tin now.

Anton

[Anton Shepelev]

Ted S.:

> Anton Shepelev:

>
> > An article is written once, but read many times.
> > Therefore, it is the author who should take utmost care
> > to produce a well-formatted message.
>
> Which you're failing to do by posting right-justified
> texts on Usenet that include hyphenating words across line
> breaks. I find that incredibly irritating to read. (The
> hyphenating more than the overshort lines, which is also
> an irritant.)

Hmmmm. Using groff, I have complete control over the
formatting of my messages, and this layout is what looks
best to me. I wonder what others think about it. For an
example, in this post I have increased the line length to 60
characters and disabled hyphenation.

Anton

[Anton Shepelev]

Stan Brown:

> > An article is written once, but read many
> > times. Therefore, it is the author who should
> > take utmost care to produce a well-formatted
> > message.
>
> That's my feeling also. It is the argument behind
> trimming quotes, and behind posting right side up.

Do you mean quoting only relevant stuff and not top-
posting? If so, then I agree entirely. At work I
am often forwarded e-mails full of ugly top-posted
HTML madness, with _lots_ of vertical space taken up
by Outlook's fluff that it adds when quoting and
that nobody has taken care to remove.

They say it is a nice way to have the whole conver-
sation at hand and the newest reply at the top, so
as not to have to scroll all the way down to it. I
tell them it's bacause they're unaware of threading,
which even Outlook supports, and that scrolling to
the bottom in a decent application is a matter of a
single keystroke -- a fair price for keeping the
discussion naturally ordered. They only smirk,
probably because their sense of taste has been
dulled.

Anton

[Anton Shepelev]

Ivan Shmakov:

> > It's just because I want to make my colleagues
> > migrate to a local Usenet group instead of the
> > bloated web-based corporate portal which I hate.
>

> I wonder if an Atom (or RSS) feed capability, be-
> ing added to that portal, could resolve your is-

> sues?
>
> I believe that there're even ways to convert such
> feeds into a form acceptable by newsreaders.

> (E.g., http://gwene.org/ does just that.)

But aren't feeds uni-directional and unusable as a
means of communication?

> > I don't even no how to dissuade them from using
> > HTML in email. It is not only incompatible with
> > good email clients but also looks plumb ugly,
> > when formed using Outlook's editor.
>
> While there're certainly many different ways to
> author "poor" HTML, it doesn't mean that HTML by
> itself has to be avoided at all costs for certain
> media, such as e-mail or news.
>
> Actually, I tend advocate /for/ the use of HTML
> (or, rather, XHTML) in e-mail in news, despite
> that my user agent of choice has poor support for

> it. (And I think of it as an opportunity to im-

> prove the latter.)
>
> At the very least, it allows one to avoid such an
> ad-hockery as /slashes/ /for/ /slanted/, and

> *stars* *for* *bold*. Not to mention "proper" ta-
> bles, formatted vs. "preformatted" text distinc-

> tion, and inline MathML formulae and SVG graphics.

I have never seen an HTML e-mail that wouldn't have
become better by rewriting it in plain text. People
that use HTML in e-mail tend to be unaware of the
underlying medium of all "them fancy formatting fea-
tures" and abuse them badly and without taste. They
paste lists and tables into Outlook directly from
MS Word and are happy about it, while the result it
outright horrible. Preformatted text viewed in a
monospace font is always better than that.

As you have shown, it is possible to highlight words
in plain text. Formulas can expressed like they are
in programming languages or LaTeX source, and graph-
ics should be converted to ASCII-art, linked, or at-
tached, depending on the circumstances.

Apart from the aesthetic reasons, I like plain text
for it's utter simplicity, transparecy, and suit-
abilty for automated searching and processing. One
doesn't have to use a parser to comfortably read and
operate plain-text files.

Reflowing is more difficult indeed, so you can ei-
ther work with non-formatted plain-text, without any
justification and having one line per paragraph, or
use a reflowing algorithm which is very easy except
for a hyphen at the end of a line.

I used to typeset books in PageMaker 7.0, from pre-
formatted source. I didn't know regular expressions
then, and several Replace operations in MS Word were
enough to have it reflowed, separated into para-
graphs, and ready for pasting into PageMaker.

> > (Not that I'd advocate for Trn or Tin.)
>
> (Which, AFAIK, lack support for both RFC 2047 and
> MIME.)

tin has it. Don't know about trn.

> > I use troff to format my messages. In vim I
> > have macro that formats the text right inside
> > the editor, while in Sylpheed (or any other GUI-
> > based newsreader) I have to copy-pased formatted
> > text into the internal editor.
>
> BTW, I'm pretty sure that *roff can produce HTML
> just as well these days. In particular, HTML is
> easier to "reflow" than the hyphenated text *roff
> could also provide.

Yes, indeed. And I can turn hyphenation off.

> > But I wonder, how does one process a set of ar-

> > ticles using standard POSIX tools from within,
> > say, Tin?
>
> I believe that the point was that it could process
> /any/ of the articles, not necessarily a set of

> them in a batch. (Sorry if my translation was in-
> correct in that regard.)

I am Russian :-) I understood the guy as talking
about using linux command-line tools for processing
messages right from within tin.

Anton

[Beauregard T. Shagnasty]

Anton Shepelev wrote:

> Ted S.:
>> Anton Shepelev:
>> > An article is written once, but read many times. Therefore,
>> > it is the author who should take utmost care to produce a
>> > well-formatted message.
>>
>> Which you're failing to do by posting right-justified texts on
>> Usenet that include hyphenating words across line breaks. I find
>> that incredibly irritating to read. (The hyphenating more than the
>> overshort lines, which is also an irritant.)
>
> Hmmmm. Using groff, I have complete control over the formatting
> of my messages, and this layout is what looks best to me. I
> wonder what others think about it.

Well, I certainly don't like it. Every time my eye gets to one of those
two- and three-space gaps, it stops, thinking I've reached the end of a
sentence. You are interrupting the flow for people who read faster than
an elementary level. It is choppy. Don't do it. Justified text only works
in books.

> For an example, in this post I have
> increased the line length to 60 characters and disabled hyphenation.

There's nothing wrong with 60-character lines and no hyphens.

--
-bts
-This space for rent, but the price is high

[Mike Yetto]

Anton Shepelev <anto...@gmail.com> writes and having writ moves on.

I like 65 character maximum line lengths, so yours aren't too
short. However, justification should only be used with
proportional fonts having the proper kerning tables, especially
with short line lengths.

Since you have no control over the font without using (ptooi)
HTML, justification should be avoided.

Mike "for ease of reading" Yetto
--
In theory, theory and practice are the same.
In practice they are not.

[Beauregard T. Shagnasty]

Mike Yetto wrote to Anton:

> Since you have no control over the font without using (ptooi) HTML,
> justification should be avoided.

..and then he'd probably select Comic Sans, or some other font I don't
have. That's frequently the case in some HTML email I receive.

> Mike "for ease of reading" Yetto

I read my email and news with Courier 12 point.

[Gene E. Bloch]

On Mon, 30 Apr 2012 00:15:25 +0000 (UTC), Beauregard T. Shagnasty wrote:

> Mike Yetto wrote to Anton:
>
>> Since you have no control over the font without using (ptooi) HTML,
>> justification should be avoided.
>
> ..and then he'd probably select Comic Sans, or some other font I don't
> have. That's frequently the case in some HTML email I receive.
>
>> Mike "for ease of reading" Yetto
>
> I read my email and news with Courier 12 point.

Have you guys been getting your word-processing software at The Gap
again?

[Ivan Shmakov]

>>>>> Anton Shepelev <anto...@gmail.com> writes:
>>>>> Ivan Shmakov:

>>> It's just because I want to make my colleagues migrate to a local
>>> Usenet group instead of the bloated web-based corporate portal
>>> which I hate.

>> I wonder if an Atom (or RSS) feed capability, being added to that
>> portal, could resolve your issues?

>> I believe that there're even ways to convert such feeds into a form
>> acceptable by newsreaders. (E.g., http://gwene.org/ does just
>> that.)

> But aren't feeds uni-directional and unusable as a means of
> communication?

It depends. Check, e. g., RFC 5023.

[…]

[Ivan Shmakov]

>>>>> Anton Shepelev <anto...@gmail.com> writes:
>>>>> Ivan Shmakov:

[Cross-posting to news:news.misc, for the discussion is not
quite about the newsreading software.]

[…]

>> Actually, I tend advocate /for/ the use of HTML (or, rather, XHTML)
>> in e-mail in news, despite that my user agent of choice has poor

>> support for it. (And I think of it as an opportunity to improve the

>> latter.)

>> At the very least, it allows one to avoid such an ad-hockery as
>> /slashes/ /for/ /slanted/, and *stars* *for* *bold*. Not to mention

>> "proper" tables, formatted vs. "preformatted" text distinction, and

>> inline MathML formulae and SVG graphics.

> I have never seen an HTML e-mail that wouldn't have become better by
> rewriting it in plain text.

What's wrong with, e. g., news:86haxbp...@gray.siamics.net
or news:86r4wac...@gray.siamics.net?

> People that use HTML in e-mail tend to be unaware of the underlying

> medium of all "them fancy formatting features" and abuse them badly

> and without taste. They paste lists and tables into Outlook directly
> from MS Word and are happy about it, while the result it outright
> horrible. Preformatted text viewed in a monospace font is always
> better than that.

As I've said before, there're many different ways to author
“poor” HTML. It doesn't mean that any HTML is /necessarily/
bad.

> As you have shown, it is possible to highlight words in plain text.

Yes, but then my Gnus shows /foo/ as highlighted foo, because it
thinks that slashes mean slanted text here, not the Unix
directory separators they in fact are.

> Formulas can expressed like they are in programming languages or
> LaTeX source,

I disagree.

Would LaTeX code be a preferable form of presentation, I guess
we'd see a lot of scientific journals switching to it from the
now-ubiquitous mathematic notation.

Using * to mean ⋅ or ×, or introducing “new” functions, such as
abs, expt, pow, sqrt, etc., doesn't seem sane, either.

That being said, Unicode-based plain-text allows ❘x❘, x¹²³, and
even √x̅. However, I don't know of any easy way to author such
formulae, while there're a few translators from a subset of
LaTeX to MathML.

> and graphics should be converted to ASCII-art,

What for?

> linked, or attached, depending on the circumstances.

The graphics, both linked and provided as separate MIME parts,
could be presented in a specific place of an HTML-based message
referencing it. Not so for a message based on plain-text.

> Apart from the aesthetic reasons, I like plain text for it's utter

> simplicity, transparecy, and suitabilty for automated searching and
> processing.

I disagree. None of the automated formatters I know can handle
hyphenated text, and none of them could discern “verbatim” text
(such as a source code fragment, or ASCII art) from the
“normal”, formatted text.

Or think of the slanted (or bold) face examples above. What if
I wish to drop all the slanted face markup, while leaving Unix
absolute filenames alone?

> One doesn't have to use a parser to comfortably read and operate
> plain-text files.

I disagree. Think of parsing a formatted table, like:

Column 1 Columns 2, 3
Column 2 Column 3

Whatever there is 1 Foo bar
And here's the other 2 Baz

(If that's not hard enough, consider adding various box drawing
characters to the formatting, like it was common for the DOS-era
plain text.)

While it's easy to convert (or format) an HTML table to a
plain-text presentation like the above (think of Lynx or
html2text), it's much harder the other way around.

XML is much more suitable for automated processing. Consider,
e. g., XPath, XQuery, XSLT, xmlstarlet(1), etc.

[…]

[tlvp]

On Sun, 29 Apr 2012 19:44:47 +0000 (UTC), Anton Shepelev wrote:

> ... Using groff, I have complete control over the

> formatting of my messages, and this layout is what looks
> best to me. I wonder what others think about it. For an
> example, in this post I have increased the line length to 60
> characters and disabled hyphenation.
>
> Anton

Heh-heh ... your groff control doesn't affect how Dialog spaces the
characters, and as Dialog is using my choice of a proportionally spaced
font, all your carefully justified layout goes to waste -- here it's all
flush-left, ragged-right that I get to see, along with the occasional
amusing multiple-space break between successive words :-) .

But don't be offended, and please don't think I mind :-) . Cheers, -- tlvp

[tlvp]

On Sun, 29 Apr 2012 19:03:56 -0400, Mike Yetto wrote:

> Since you have no control over the font without using (ptooi)
> HTML, justification should be avoided.

Heck, even using HTML, you have no control over the font *I* get to see,
because I read the text/plain version that Dialog is all too ready to show.
Only very rarely do I find it necessary to view the text/html version too.

> Mike "for ease of reading" Yetto

And yes, that's exactly "for ease of reading" -- and to avoid gratuitous
noises (like the Elephants_trumpeting.wav files that some idiots enjoy
including in their HTML posts), and other undesirable components.

[tlvp]

On Sun, 29 Apr 2012 21:27:13 -0700, Gene E. Bloch wrote:

> On Mon, 30 Apr 2012 00:15:25 +0000 (UTC), Beauregard T. Shagnasty wrote:
>
>> Mike Yetto wrote to Anton:
>>

>>> Mike "for ease of reading" Yetto
>>
>> I read my email and news with Courier 12 point.
>
> Have you guys been getting your word-processing software at The Gap
> again?

Nah, they just refused to wear braces as kids, so they write all
snaggle-toothed now :-) . Cheers, -- tlvp

[Shmuel Metz]

In <slrnjpqj0u.1...@ID-107770.user.individual.net>, on
04/29/2012

at 02:34 PM, Whiskers <catwh...@operamail.com> said:

>Both Sylpheed and Claws Mail allow the user to specify an external
>editor,

I read the OP as wanting all news readers to support an external
editor. IMHO it's a reasonable criterion.

--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT <http://patriot.net/~shmuel>

Unsolicited bulk E-mail subject to legal action. I reserve the
right to publicly post or ridicule any abusive E-mail. Reply to
domain Patriot dot net user shmuel+news to contact me. Do not
reply to spam...@library.lspace.org

[Shmuel Metz]

In <a03s9m...@mid.individual.net>, on 04/28/2012

at 08:53 PM, Mike Easter <Mi...@ster.invalid> said:

>(And) I have reported the problem with how Tb, which claims to be
>format=flowed as well as stamping it in the header, fails to properly
> and compliantly (there is an RFC) handle quoted f=f text numerous
>times since Tb3 which is now at Tb 12, but nothing keeps happening
>on the developers end, who are busily implementing new features.

Is it possible that they are compliant with RFC 2646 but not with RFC
3676, which obsoleted 2646? Of course, the new RFC is almost a decade
old, so that wouldn't excuse them.

[Mike Easter]

Shmuel wrote:

> Mike Easter said:
>
>> (And) I have reported the problem with how Tb, which claims to be
>> format=flowed as well as stamping it in the header, fails to properly
>> and compliantly (there is an RFC) handle quoted f=f text numerous
>> times since Tb3 which is now at Tb 12, but nothing keeps happening
>> on the developers end, who are busily implementing new features.
>
> Is it possible that they are compliant with RFC 2646 but not with RFC
> 3676, which obsoleted 2646? Of course, the new RFC is almost a decade
> old, so that wouldn't excuse them.

I believe Tb 0.4 > 1.0 brought itself into compliance with DelSp 3676
back in 2004-5 if I understand this bug report correctly.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=231701 Bug 231701 -
format=flowed DelSp=yes not supported (RFC 3676) - Status: RESOLVED FIXED


A long time ago, Tb2 could f=f quoted text. That ability was
lost/regressed with Tb3 and has never been regained in many releases
since, just with a patch introduced years ago, but never implemented in
a release.


--
Mike Easter

[Whiskers]

"Go to the source" <grin> <http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/>

[Mike Easter]

Whiskers wrote:

> Mike Easter wrote:

>> I'm confused about Sylpheed. The last two linux sylpheeds I've seen
>> didn't have an option to create a new nntp account, just pop, imap,
>> gmail pop and gmail imap.

> "Go to the source"<grin> <http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/>

Actually that front page sez "Sylpheed is a simple, lightweight but
featureful, and easy-to-use e-mail client."

... but the next page sez "also NNTP (NetNews)"

I found/ was told/ how to create a new nntp account from Anton's 'Edit
accounts' message, so that new account wizard fooled/misled me.

Also, the wiki article makes Claws sound like a much stronger agent than
Sylpheed

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylpheed Claws Mail (formerly the
Sylpheed-Claws project within Sylpheed) is a fork that offers extra and
extended features, among them scoring, QuickSearch, icon themes,
user-defined Actions, mailing list support, plugins for SpamAssassin,
Bogofilter, RSS, Calendaring, HTML rendering, and others.

... and the Claws article makes longer lists of its features
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claws_Mail

Claws and perhaps Sylpheed give some kind of support to format=flowed,
but I don't recall just what.


--
Mike Easter

[tlvp]

On Mon, 30 Apr 2012 22:12:02 +0000 (UTC), Anton Shepelev wrote:

> Even e^(sin x) is impossible.

Really? Well, congratulations, then: you just did the impossible :-) !

[Stan Brown]

On Sun, 29 Apr 2012 20:55:50 +0000 (UTC), Beauregard T. Shagnasty
wrote:
>

> Anton Shepelev wrote:
>
> > Ted S.:
> >> Anton Shepelev:
> >> > An article is written once, but read many times. Therefore,
> >> > it is the author who should take utmost care to produce a
> >> > well-formatted message.
> >>
> >> Which you're failing to do by posting right-justified texts on
> >> Usenet that include hyphenating words across line breaks. I find
> >> that incredibly irritating to read. (The hyphenating more than the
> >> overshort lines, which is also an irritant.)
> >
> > Hmmmm. Using groff, I have complete control over the formatting
> > of my messages, and this layout is what looks best to me. I
> > wonder what others think about it.

Add my name to the list of those that hate it.

> Well, I certainly don't like it. Every time my eye gets to one of
> those two- and three-space gaps, it stops, thinking I've reached
> the end of a sentence. You are interrupting the flow for people who
> read faster than an elementary level. It is choppy. Don't do it.
> Justified text only works in books.
>
> > For an example, in this post I have
> > increased the line length to 60 characters and disabled hyphenation.
>
> There's nothing wrong with 60-character lines and no hyphens.

Agreed.

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com
Shikata ga nai...

[Anton Shepelev]

tlv:

> > Even e^(sin x) is impossible.
>
> Really? Well, congratulations, then: you just did

> the impossible :‐) !

Heh, that’s the plain‐text ASCII notation that I
think is the best for Usenet and e‐mail and that
Ivan Smakov doesn’t like, preferring either Unicode
symbols or a full‐fledged equation description lan‐
guage interpreted by newsreaders...

‐‐
() ascii ribbon campaign ‐ against html e‐mail
/\ www.asciiribbon.org ‐ against proprietary attachments

[Anton Shepelev]

Beauregard T. Shagnasty:

> > Hmmmm. Using groff, I have complete control
> > over the formatting of my messages, and this
> > layout is what looks best to me. I wonder what
> > others think about it.
>
> Well, I certainly don’t like it. Every time my

> eye gets to one of those two‐ and three‐space

> gaps, it stops, thinking I’ve reached the end of a

> sentence. You are interrupting the flow for peo‐

> ple who read faster than an elementary level. It
> is choppy. Don’t do it. Justified text only
> works in books.

Another hmmmm. I thought that with fast reading one
was less sensitive to low‐level details because the
basic interpretation was more sub‐conscious, and
whole words, sentences, paragraphs, and even pages
were "read in" during a single "fixation":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_(process)

You must have similar problems with man‐pages on
text‐mode terminals, right?

[Anton Shepelev]

Mike Yetto:

> > formatting of my messages, and this layout is
> > what looks best to me. I wonder what others
> > think about it. For an example, in this post I
> > have increased the line length to 60 characters
> > and disabled hyphenation.
>
> I like 65 character maximum line lengths, so yours
> aren’t too short. However, justification should
> only be used with proportional fonts having the
> proper kerning tables, especially with short line
> lengths.
>
> Since you have no control over the font without

> using (ptooi) HTML, justification should be avoid‐
> ed.

A little correction here. The main difference be‐
tween justification on character‐cell device and in
a real book is that in the latter the space symbol
may be of arbitrary width, while on the former its
width is confined to a integer number of cell
widths. It doesn’t have much to do either with
kerning, which is infinitesimal adjustment of space
between certain pairs of letters, or with whether
the font is proportional or not, because the space
character can be arbitrarily stretched in both.

Whithout any justification applied, text viewed in a
monospace font will have all characters aligned on a
rectangular grid, which always was ‐‐ and I am
afraid I can’t say "is" ‐‐ the standard assumtion
for viewing plain text, e‐mail and Usenet included,
because:

a. Character‐cell devices (printers and termi‐
nals) did (do) just that.

b. It is a certain way to preserve any format‐
ting, justification and drawings (ASCII art),
which truly makes it a device‐independed for‐
mat!

[Beauregard T. Shagnasty]

Anton Shepelev wrote:

> Beauregard T. Shagnasty:
>> > Hmmmm. Using groff, I have complete control over the formatting
>> > of my messages, and this layout is what looks best to me. I
>> > wonder what others think about it.
>>
>> Well, I certainly don’t like it. Every time my eye gets to one
>> of those two‐ and three‐space gaps, it stops, thinking I’ve reached
>> the end of a sentence. You are interrupting the flow for peo‐ ple who
>> read faster than an elementary level. It is choppy. Don’t do it.
>> Justified text only works in books.

You've even reformatted *my* content. How cheeky!

> Another hmmmm. I thought that with fast reading one was less sensitive
> to low‐level details because the basic interpretation was more
> sub‐conscious, and whole words, sentences, paragraphs, and even pages
> were "read in" during a single "fixation":

Yes, I read rather fast. The thing is when I come to a large
area of white space, I'm expecting a new sentence.

I also don't like your arbitrary use of hyphen-space in the middle of
words in the middle of lines. Like "be- tween" in one of your posts.

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_(process)

"A key technique in studying how individuals read text is eye tracking. "
-- and you purposely break up the track.

> You must have similar problems with man‐pages on text‐mode
> terminals, right?

No, because they are technical in nature, and not prose.

> () ascii ribbon campaign ‐ against html e‐mail /\ www.asciiribbon.org
> ‐ against proprietary attachments

How about a campaign against justified text?

..and your sig-sep is broken.

[Kathy Morgan]

tlvp <mPiOsUcB...@att.net> wrote:

> TW, does Eudora do Newsgroups? or only Mail?

Nope, it only does mail.

--
Kathy

[Anton Shepelev]

Mike Easter:

> Also, the wiki article makes Claws sound like a

> much stronger agent than Sylpheed.
>
> Claws Mail (formerly the Sylpheed‐Claws project

> within Sylpheed) is a fork that offers extra and

> extended features, among them scoring, Quick‐
> Search, icon themes, user‐defined Actions, mailing
> list support, plugins for SpamAssassin, Bogofil‐

> ter, RSS, Calendaring, HTML rendering, and others.
>

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylpheed

> ... and the Claws article makes longer lists of
> its features
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claws_Mail
>

> Claws and perhaps Sylpheed give some kind of sup‐

> port to format=flowed, but I don’t recall just
> what.

Sylpheed indeed has only part of the features you
have quoted Claws having, but IMHO it is more beau‐
tiful and light (in the sense of distraction‐free),
and some of the features in Sylpheed are more effi‐
cient than in Claws, e.g. QuickSearch.

Sylpheed doesn’t screw encodings in either e‐mail or
nntp, neither in the headers nor in the body; it
supports plain‐text messages and doesn’t distort
them like, for example, Apple Mail or Outlook do; it
has an option to try to render HTML messages in non‐
agressive plain‐text style; it has some nice GUI
features like dynamically configurable short‐cuts,
so one can highlight a menu item and assign a hotkey
to it by pressing the desired key combination (it’s
a GTK feature), so I can select a whole Usenet
thread with a single keypress, and drag it to an
IMAP folder to archieve it or forward it as an at‐
tachent to a friend.

Futhermore, its configuration is defined by several
XML files and an INI file, and it stores all mes‐
sages in files, which makes them easy to work with
using external programs. Migrating to another ma‐
chine is as easy as copying those setup and message
files to the desired destination, and specifying
this destination in the INI.

In most aspects, it’s a joy to work with this pro‐
gram and I am forgiving it the small drawbacks it
has. Sypheed provides a good "filtering rules"
mechanism, but it doesn’t work with NNTP accounts
and, as far as I know, killfiles are not supported.

Most of what I have said probably applies to Claws
too, but after Sylpheed I didn’t like Claws and had
to revert to the former.

Sylpheed is being actively developed and has a busy
mailing list.

‐‐

[Anton Shepelev]

Stan Brown:

> > Hmmmm. Using groff, I have complete con‐

> > trol over the formatting of my messages, and
> > this layout is what looks best to me. I
> > wonder what others think about it.
>
> Add my name to the list of those that hate it.

Added.

> > > For an example, in this post I have increased
> > > the line length to 60 characters and disabled
> > > hyphenation.
> >

> > There’s nothing wrong with 60‐character lines
> > and no hyphens.
>
> Agreed.

And the justification?

[Gene E. Bloch]

On Tue, 1 May 2012 20:29:49 +0000 (UTC), Beauregard T. Shagnasty wrote:

> How about a campaign against justified text?

That would be totally unjustified.

I might've had a hard day, so please let me make my puns :-)

[Anton Shepelev]

Beauregard T. Shagnasty:

> You’ve even reformatted *my* content. How cheeky!

Oh, but I didn’t mean any harm.

> > Another hmmmm. I thought that with fast reading one was less sensitive
> > to low‐level details because the basic interpretation was more
> > sub‐conscious, and whole words, sentences, paragraphs, and even pages
> > were "read in" during a single "fixation":
>
> Yes, I read rather fast. The thing is when I come to a large
> area of white space, I’m expecting a new sentence.
>

> I also don’t like your arbitrary use of hyphen‐space in the middle of
> words in the middle of lines. Like "be‐ tween" in one of your posts.

Well, you reformat my justified and hyphenated text
deliberatly preserving all the artifacts like conse‐
quent spaces and hyphens and complain about them?

> > You must have similar problems with man‐pages on text‐mode
> > terminals, right?
>
> No, because they are technical in nature, and not prose.

Many of them contain massive amounts of running
text, not to be compared with the tiny messages of
mine. And, no, they are prose (not poetry, except
for Pearl manuals...).

> > () ascii ribbon campaign ‐ against html e‐mail / www.asciiribbon.org
> > ‐ against proprietary attachments
>
> How about a campaign against justified text?

By all means, go for it. But it will be internally
inconsistent without a sub‐company against man
pages.

> ..and your sig‐sep is broken.

You broke it.

‐‐

[tlvp]

On Tue, 1 May 2012 19:53:06 +0000 (UTC), Anton Shepelev wrote:

> tlv:
>
>>> Even e^(sin x) is impossible.
>>
>> Really? Well, congratulations, then: you just did
>> the impossible :‐) !
>
> Heh, that’s the plain‐text ASCII notation that I
> think is the best for Usenet and e‐mail and that
> Ivan Smakov doesn’t like, preferring either Unicode
> symbols or a full‐fledged equation description lan‐
> guage interpreted by newsreaders...

I guess if you want NG participants to *see* it the way it might look in a
book, you just have to make a .png or an .svg or a .gif or a .pdf out of it
and *attach* it to your post (and hope that the NG accepts attachments).

But, like you, I'd rather do only what *can* easily be done :-) .

[Gene E. Bloch]

Another use for YouSendIt and similar sites that allow a user to upload
a file and give other people access to the file.

This is not needed if you have a site of your own you can use for the
purpose.

You can upload the item and put a URL in your post.

[Ted S.]

On Tue, 1 May 2012 19:53:06 +0000 (UTC), Anton Shepelev wrote:

> Heh, that’s the plain‐text ASCII notation that I
> think is the best for Usenet

And yet you're needlessly using a Unicode hyphen in "plain-text".

--
Ted S.
fedya at hughes dot net
Now blogging at http://justacineast.blogspot.com

[teabag]

Anton Shepelev wrote:

>> ..and your sig‐sep is broken.
>
> You broke it.

No, he didn't. Hers's what broke it:
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64

Is the hyphen you are using causing that?

[tlvp]

On Tue, 1 May 2012 20:52:54 +0000 (UTC), Anton Shepelev wrote:

> And the justification?

Justification's' not needed on more than the left side.

[tlvp]

On Tue, 1 May 2012 21:10:21 +0000 (UTC), Anton Shepelev wrote:

>> ..and your sig‐sep is broken.
>
> You broke it.
>
> ‐‐
> () ascii ribbon campaign ‐ against html e‐mail

Sorry, what I see as *near*-sig-sep is just two hyphens on a line of their
own, not two hyphens and a space :-) . "Yours truly, the Referee :-) ."

Cheers, -- tlvp

[tlvp]

Thanks, Kathy. A straight answer here, for a welcome change :-) .

[tlvp]

On Tue, 1 May 2012 21:33:08 -0400, Ted S. wrote:

> On Tue, 1 May 2012 19:53:06 +0000 (UTC), Anton Shepelev wrote:
>
>> Heh, that’s the plain‐text ASCII notation that I
>> think is the best for Usenet
>
> And yet you're needlessly using a Unicode hyphen in "plain-text".

Good grief, Ted, you're right: " ... that’s the plain†text ... " -- it
even has a fancy Unicode apostrophe before that (!). Thank goodness for
"Raw message" view in Dialog, I'd never have noticed otherwise :-) .

[XS11E]

tlvp <mPiOsUcB...@att.net> wrote:

> On Tue, 1 May 2012 12:40:12 -0800, Kathy Morgan wrote:
>
>> tlvp <mPiOsUcB...@att.net> wrote:
>>
>>> TW, does Eudora do Newsgroups? or only Mail?
>>
>> Nope, it only does mail.
>
> Thanks, Kathy. A straight answer here, for a welcome change :-) .

Straight and wrong. Here's the problem, there are two totally
different Eudoras.

One is a product of Qualcomm and is still available although it's
getting a little long in the tooth it still works pretty well AFAIK.
It does not do newsgroups.

Qualcomm decided to dump Eudora and gave it to the Mozilla group who
tacked some Eudora icons on top of Thunderburp and that version does do
newsgroups.

So... the correct answer is: Which Eudora?

--
XS11E, Killing all posts from Google Groups
The Usenet Improvement Project:
http://twovoyagers.com/improve-usenet.org/

[Mike Easter]

XS11E wrote:

> Qualcomm decided to dump Eudora and gave it to the Mozilla group who
> tacked some Eudora icons on top of Thunderburp and that version does do
> newsgroups.
>
> So... the correct answer is: Which Eudora?

And the Eudora > Tbird transition involved various names such as Eudora
8, Penelope, and then Eudora OSE OpenSourceEdition.

Somewhere along the way, development ceased and the project stagnated
and the true Eudora fans didn't like what they had so far from moz so
they were fleeing the sinking ship and racing back to the old Eudora.

Meanwhile the file formats for such as addressbooks and mailstores were
completely different, so that part was a little tricky for those
abandoning 8/penelope/OSE for old E. Fortunately the old Eudora can
recognize Tbird formats for mail as the old Netscape of all things.

Trivia Q: Which came first, Netscape or the original original Eudora
(before Qualcomm's)?

Answer: Steve Dorner's Eudora 1988, then Qualcomm acquired and
developed Eudora 1991-2008, whereas Netscape first came along in 1994.


--
Mike Easter

[Ivan Shmakov]

>>>>> Anton Shepelev <anto...@gmail.com> writes:
>>>>> tlv:

>>> Even e^(sin x) is impossible.

>> Really? Well, congratulations, then: you just did the impossible
>> :‐) !

> Heh, that’s the plain‐text ASCII notation that I think is the best
> for Usenet and e‐mail and that Ivan Smakov doesn’t like, preferring
> either Unicode symbols or a full‐fledged equation description lan‐
> guage interpreted by newsreaders...

Newsreaders need to understand a mathematical notation language
as much as they need to understand Ext2.

(IOW, they can delegate this task to the underlying OS.)

--
FSF associate member #7257

[Ivan Shmakov]

>>>>> Gene E Bloch <not...@other.invalid> writes:
>>>>> On Tue, 1 May 2012 19:39:56 -0400, tlvp wrote:

[Cross-posting to news:comp.mail.misc, for the question is about
MIME, and dropping news:news.misc from Followup-To:.]

[…]

>> I guess if you want NG participants to *see* it the way it might
>> look in a book, you just have to make a .png or an .svg or a .gif or
>> a .pdf out of it and *attach* it to your post (and hope that the NG
>> accepts attachments).

>> But, like you, I'd rather do only what *can* easily be done :-) .

> Another use for YouSendIt and similar sites that allow a user to
> upload a file and give other people access to the file.

> This is not needed if you have a site of your own you can use for the
> purpose.

> You can upload the item and put a URL in your post.

Somehow, I've had an impression that MIME allows for “external”
parts. I wonder if I could wrap an URI into such a part, so
that the user agent on the recipient's end would download such a
part as soon the user chooses to operate on it?

[Ivan Shmakov]

>>>>> tlvp <mPiOsUcB...@att.net> writes:

[…]

> I guess if you want NG participants to *see* it the way it might
> look in a book, you just have to make a .png or an .svg or a .gif or
> a .pdf out of it and *attach* it to your post (and hope that the NG
> accepts attachments).

That'd be NTA, not the group, BTW.

> But, like you, I'd rather do only what *can* easily be done :-) .

Given the right tool, why won't it be easy, anyway?

I guess one may think of Google Drive and Google+. (Though I've
never used either of them myself.)

[Kathy Morgan]

XS11E <xs1...@SPAMyahoo.com> wrote:

> Straight and wrong. Here's the problem, there are two totally

> different Eudoras. [...]

>
> So... the correct answer is: Which Eudora?

That occurred to me after I'd already posted. Thank you and thanks,
Mike, for giving much more complete and accurate answers than mine was.

--
Kathy

[Ivan Shmakov]

>>>>> Anton Shepelev <anto...@gmail.com> writes:
>>>>> Ivan Shmakov:

[Cross-posting to news:comp.text, for there isn't a separate
newsgroup for *roff.]

>>> I have never seen an HTML e‐mail that wouldn’t have become better
>>> by rewriting it in plain text.

>> What’s

BTW, there I had the proper APOSTROPHE (U+0027) character, but
it was changed somehow to RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK (U+2019),
which is a change in the meaning.

Do I understand it correctly that the formatter's configuration
you use doesn't distinguish between these two?

>> wrong with, e. g., news:86haxbp...@gray.siamics.net or
>> news:86r4wac...@gray.siamics.net?

[…]

>> Would LaTeX code be a preferable form of presentation, I guess we’d
>> see a lot of scientific journals switching to it from the
>> now‐ubiquitous

Also, there HYPHEN-MINUS (U+002D) was replaced by
HYPHEN (U+2019), so I guess that the formatter doesn't
distinguish these two, either. (Note that while in this
particular case this change doesn't affect the meaning, such a
change done for, e. g., a code fragment, would be destructive.)

>> mathematic notation.

[…]

> ‐‐

There, the signature delimiter was changed from the customary
“-- ”, or (U+002D, U+002D, U+0020), to “‐‐” (or U+2010, U+2010),
which, I believe, most of the newsreaders currently in use won't
recognize as such a delimiter.

“-- ” is an element of “news markup language”, after all.
Changing it “‐‐” has roughly the same effect as changing <pre />
to 〈pre /〉 in HTML.

> () ascii ribbon campaign ‐ against html e‐mail

> /\ www.asciiribbon.org ‐ against proprietary attachments

(Ironically, neither U+2010 nor U+2019 is ASCII.)

[Anton Shepelev]

Ted S.:

> And yet you're needlessly using a Unicode hyphen
> in "plain-text".

Yes, indeed. I switched my groff and tin configura-
tion to Unicode to test tin's handling of RFC 2047.
By default, groff's utf8 device maps ASCII hyphen
and apostrophe to their specific Unicode representa-
tions, and I forgot to turn it off. It only re-
quires to comment two lines in

.../share/groff/<version>/tmac/unicode.tmac

Anton

[Ivan Shmakov]

>>>>> Anton Shepelev <anto...@gmail.com> writes:
>>>>> Ivan Shmakov:

[This one got too long, so I'm splitting it into two parts. In
this part, I'm focusing on why one'd use XHTML to format
“simple” Usenet and e-mail messages; the images, formulae, and
the like are not considered.]

>>> I have never seen an HTML e‐mail that wouldn’t have become better
>>> by rewriting it in plain text.

>> What’s wrong with, e. g., news:86haxbp...@gray.siamics.net or
>> news:86r4wac...@gray.siamics.net?

> Sorry, I counln’t find them. Those are MessageIDs, right?

The part next to news: is indeed a Message-ID:. As a whole,
these are news: schema URI's, as per RFC 5538.

[…]

>> As I’ve said before, there’re many different ways to author “poor”
>> HTML. It doesn’t mean that any HTML is /necessarily/ bad.

> Agree, but I wanted to show you the corelation and that plain‐text
> stops people from abusing HTML.

I'd only accept this argument if plain text would also prevent
them from overquoting and top-posting!

(My ongoing recommendation is to “do it right or not at all.”)

[…]

>>> Apart from the aesthetic reasons, I like plain text for it’s utter
>>> simplicity, transparecy, and suitabilty for automated searching and
>>> processing.

>> I disagree. None of the automated formatters I know can handle
>> hyphenated text, and none of them could discern “verbatim” text
>> (such as a source code fragment, or ASCII art) from the “normal”,
>> formatted text.

[…]

> Yes, I was talking about the simplest case of ragged‐right and
> unhyphenated. Several programs go a step futher and treat everything
> that has an indent as verbatim.

Unfortunately, my personal preference is to keep the /formatted/
text indented, while the “verbatim” text is put “as is”, in part
to make it easy to copy & paste it. (Think of code fragments,
for instance, where indent /may/ be an element of syntax, as in
the case of Python or Fortran 77.)

> And with reading/searching my statement holds even for preformatted
> text.

While I definitely can read plain text, I'm certainly able to
imagine a better “reading experience” for me.

For instance, I can imagine a newsreader reformatting the
articles to match /my/ preferences, like, for formatted text:
left margin at column 8, right margin at column 72, “reflown”
and “ragged right” (while for “verbatim” text these'd be: no
left margin, preserve line breaks and whitespace.)

While Gnus allows for “reflowning” (and thus setting of the
right margin) of the text of the article being displayed, it
doesn't discern (and, frankly, how could it?) between
“formatted” and “verbatim” text, and thus, while reading a
poorly (or simply not to my preferences) formatted message, I
have to choose between suffering an extra eye strain and ruining
the code examples. (And Gnus isn't smart enough to drop the
hyphens, BTW.)

Obviously, the use of just /two/ of the XHTML elements, namely
<p /> and <pre />, would resolve this whole issue!

To summarize, the very benefit of XHTML is that it lets the
/reader/ decide upon the final appearance. (Or at least it
gives the reader much more freedom in this respect than both the
plain text and PDF.)

> Besides, I think I am the only one who uses hyphenation in e‐mail and
> Usenet, and I keep groff source of important articles.

There comes a small tradeoff. When using XHTML, the version of
the article read at the other end and the version archived are
one and the same. There's no “unpublished source” to be lost.
(Think of FAQ's, or the like, where the document being posted
needs to be maintained just as well.)

> Being a typeseting system, it has a language much lighter and more
> comfortable than HTML, so I can easily strip the bare text from it

Note that there's software (html2text(1), Lynx, etc.) that
allows one to do the very same with HTML. Indeed, I'm a heavy
user of Lynx, and for the most of the time, Web is “plain-texty”
enough for me.

> or use groff to typeset a message as PDF or HTML, if need be.
> groff’s code is also much easier to read than HTML.

Indeed, I agree on that!

Note, however, that *roff, as well as LaTeX and PostScript, and
/unlike/ XHTML and PDF, is /not/ a markup language or data
format, but rather a programming language, much like ECMAScript
or Java. Thus, the use of the former on the Web and within
messages (be it e-mail, netnews, XMPP, or whatever else) has at
least the following drawbacks:

• obvious security implications; (think of infinite loops, for
instance);

• its easy to “convert” the former into the latter; not the
other way around.

Fortunately, there're a plenty of “simplified” markup languages,
such as Markdown, reStructuredText, Textile, Creole, etc.,
which, although not nearly as powerful, seem like a good fit for
e-mail and netnews (and are already widely used in various Web
forums, which, arguably, constitute a communication medium close
enough to Usenet.)

And note that posting HTML generated from either Markdown or
*roff has the very benefit of having the <p /> vs. <pre />
distinction /still present/. Which makes my dreams of easy to
re-flow mail & news messages come true! (Contrary to the
posting of plain text produced from the very same *roff source.)

The only part which is (AFAIK) currently missing is the ability
to convert HTML (or, rather, a subset of it) back into an
“editable” format, such as Markdown.

[…]

> As for the XML tools you mentioned, I am afraid every HTML message
> will require a special script to process it, becuase HTML is not
> strucured in the sense that instead of defining the funciton of an
> element (like, it is a list, it is a header, and so on), it defines
> its appearance, and the former is not easily inferred from the
> latter! On the other hand, *roff and LaTeX use structured approach.

I disagree with both of these statements. On the one hand,
contemporary HTML (HTML5, XHTML, “strict” HTML 4.01) delegates
the formatting almost exclusively to CSS (and isn't <section />
structured enough, anyway?) On the other, LaTeX has a plenty of
easy to abuse commands, such as, e. g., \bf, \sf, etc. And
indeed, there're LaTeX users (though most probably a minority)
who'd happily use, say, \noindent \large \bf Foo for the section
heading.

One more benefit of XHTML-based netnews is the ability to
specify the /language/ for the parts of the text, which improves
accessibility. (Think of speech synthesis software.)

> P. S.: Several times I have appealed to the infrequency of various
> situations you have mentioned. I find it a valid argument because
> changing the whole medium in order to satisfy several percent of
> posters at the expense of imparting overload unto the heads of the
> remaining 99 perceint would be wrong.

The inherent flaw in this argument is that by making a feature
difficult in some technology we effectively draw those who may
benefit from such a feature /away/ from this technology.
Therefore, in the long term, the only users of the latter would
be those who don't need that feature.

In the end, it's not the community that choose the technology,
but the technology that selected its users.

And then, without enough newcomers, any technology falls into
the oblivion.

[Anton Shepelev]

Ivan Shmakov:

> BTW, there I had the proper APOSTROPHE (U+0027)
> character, but it was changed somehow to RIGHT
> SINGLE QUOTATION MARK (U+2019), which is a change
> in the meaning.
>
> Do I understand it correctly that the formatter's
> configuration you use doesn't distinguish between
> these two?

It distinguishes the two symbols, but behaves ac-
cording to groff_char(7), mapping the ASCII apostro-
phe to the right single quote symbol. This can be
changed by commenting the relevant line in
unicode.tmac file in groff's tmac directory:

change: .char ' \[cq]
to: .\".char ' \[cq]

--
() ascii ribbon campaign - against html e-mail
/\ www.asciiribbon.org - against proprietary attachments

[Anton Shepelev]

Beauregard T. Shagnasty:

> Anton Shepelev
>
> > ..and your sig-sep is broken.
>
> You broke it.

My bad, sorry.

[Anton Shepelev]

teabag:

> No, he didn't. Hers's what broke it:
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64

No, not this. It was my groff configuration that in
Unicode mode was mapping ASCII minus to Unicode hy-
phen, u2010.