[Pan-users] Re: Trouble with Pan and news.grc.com

[Duncan]

Per Hedeland <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Sun,
04 Jan 2009 00:31:44 +0100:

> Who is the culprit behind the gratuitous re-formatting above (also
> present in Duncan's reply) - gmane? Or Pan?:-)

That'd be pan.  It /aggressively/ rewraps both new and quoted text unless 
you have wrap text turned off -- and then it doesn't wrap /at/ /all/, 
forcing the user to remember to wrap the new text appropriately.  Of 
course, that's a problem not only due to the necessity of remembering to 
hit return, but because unlike old-pan, the rewrite doesn't have the line 
and column position in the article editor status bar, so it'd difficult 
to know when to do the manual wrap.  One exception is direct-pasting, 
which won't be rewrapped unless you start fooling with it, triggering the 
rewrap.

The other big problem, of course, is that the only way to access the wrap 
text option is to open the article editor, by which point the quote has 
already been wrapped if one normally has wrap on, as I do.  Thus, to post 
something with a portion of the quote unwrapped, one must either 
painstakingly delete soft-wraps and insert hard-wraps as appropriate, or 
hit reply, toggle the wrap text off, cancel the post, hit reply again so 
the quote isn't rewrapped, add the new text, remembering to manually wrap 
as necessary, post, then turn wrapping back on for the next post.

Oh, and forget trying to unwrap even a single URL, if wrap is turned on.  
Pan will rewrap it as it wishes -- there's no way to force it not to, 
without turning off wrap for the rest of the post as well.  And the 
wrapped URL won't work right until the reader selects/copies it, pastes 
it somewhere and undoes the wrap, then select/copies /that/ into the 
browser or whatever (if klipper or the like isn't set to popup an open-
with dialog when it sees the URL).  So what I usually end up doing is 
writing along until it's time for the URL, put it in, let it wrap, 
thinking when I'm done (after the rest of what I'm writing is composed 
and autowrapped) I'll toggle wrap text off and fix it -- then forget to 
go back and do it, so my long-link gets split in half!

>>      Oho! Shades of the GPO! Back when I began cataloging books into
>>the Library of Congress, and it still printed literally thousands of
>>copies of every card, the formatting for the printers at the GPO was
>>coded into the spacing. If you got one too many or too few, every copy
>>of the card turned into gibberish from there down...
>>
>>      I thank you, SIR, and offer a sweeping bow to your exemplary
>>perspicacity. Thanks again!
> 
> Gee, I had to lookup both GPO (Government Printing Office?) and
> perspicacity...:-)

I didn't care enough to lookup GPO as it was obvious it was some 
government office of some sort and that's all I needed to know for the 
sentence to make sense, but perspicacity I looked up!  But a job in the 
LoC... if one doesn't pickup a few such words here or there working that, 
there's something wrong! =:^)

That he worked in the LoC /does/ explain a bit about Beartooth's posts, 
tho, just like the fact that my dad was a teacher goes some way to 
explain something about mine. =;^)

BTW, Beartooth, here's one I got a chance to use in its proper context 
for the first time the other day: bikeshedding.  There's a fair chance 
that's come along since you would have been exposed to it in the LoC, and 
it's from the vernacular of software developers, but you'll probably 
appreciate the concept once you google it, if necessary.  The story 
behind, and that gave rise to, the term "bikeshedding" makes it 
incredibly interesting /as/ a word, and "fun" to use, especially when one 
is the first in a group to accurately spot a discussion where it applies 
and labels it accordingly, which is what happened to me the other day.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman