NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Message formatting
From: George Huxtable
Date: 2010 Mar 19, 10:04 -0000
From: George Huxtable
Date: 2010 Mar 19, 10:04 -0000
I seem to need a bit of advice, please, about email message formatting. There are some things I am failing to understand. My messages are always sent and returned as simple emails. I seldom visit the "message board". Years ago, when I used a Mac, with Eudora, I didn't ask it to wrap the length of sent lines; just allowed paragraphs to be transmitted as a long stream of characters, to which return character would be applied by the receiving end as it thought fit. This seemed to satisfy everyone. When I switched to a PC, and Outlook Express, this appeared to impose a maximum length of sent lines, to 132 characters, for some reason. When sent with such a limit, this presented no difficulties at my end. My own messages, reflected back to me, fitted into the available line length. But others protested that it gave rise to problems if they wanted to quote or edit that content. Without really understanding why, I then limited the maximum line length, as sent, to 72 characters, about half as many as my screen display would conveniently allow, and that seemed to keep everyone happy. "Like poetry", was how Alex Eremenko described it. That's the situation that prevailed until a few days ago. I have no particular wish to be writing poetry, and half-filled screens, and printed pages, seem to me an unnecessary waste of space. Emails from the postings of others seem to happily spread across and fit my screen display, so presumably lack any "hard return" characters, so why couldn't mine?. So, as a few days ago I wished to send an email (not to this list) containing tabular stuff that really called for longer line lengths, I increased the line length that Outlook Express can send to the maximum allowed, 132 characters. And then left it at that. Since then, my own emails have been reflected back to me, comfortably filling my screen, and no longer looking like a newspaper column. But now, I've just been informed, off-list, by another regular Navlist poster, that this changed format gives him serious problems. I thank him for this useful information. His messages arrive to him via Internet Explorer 8, and he tells me that this message, recently sent- http://www.fer3.com/arc/m2.aspx?i=112402&y=201003 , has become particularly garbled. Most of it has run right off the screen-edge to the right (which doesn't seem to happen when I view it with IE7), also this and other messages suffer from showing alternate short-lines and long-lines (which I can see clearly when I look at that link with IE7). But even when I look into that posting, I can see that although nearly all lines are truncated at about 80 characters, curiously just one line, in quoted text near the end, seems to have an extra 15 or so characters. How does that happen? It seems to me that the short-lines, long-lines problem occurs because messages transmitted from the message board via Internet Explorer have, at some point, a return character inserted into them, wrapping after 80 characters or so, which, in addition to the hard end-of-line sent out by me after 132 characters, produces that alternating pattern of long and short lines. What's the origin of that imposed return, and why is it set at that value? Is it within IE at my end, and can I alter it? Is there any general guidance could be offered to Navlist members who post via email, about the formatting of their messages? For now, I hope to have got around the problem by wrapping line lengths at 75 characters, and will resend the offending message in that format. If readers have found any other of my recent messages to be impenetrable in that way, please say, and I'll resend. George. contact George Huxtable, at george@hux.me.uk or at +44 1865 820222 (from UK, 01865 820222) or at 1 Sandy Lane, Southmoor, Abingdon, Oxon OX13 5HX, UK.