Re: [Pan-users] underlines etc in pan

[Sebastian Fischer]

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Am Montag, 4. November 2002 17:39 schrieb Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom:
> > is there any way to make pan show underlines in news like _underline_ or
> > *accentuations*. I am a little bit confused, that pan doesn't do this by
> > default.
>
> are you talking about automatically converting plain text which looks like
> '*word*' or '_word_', and underlining or bolding it?

Yes this ist what I mean.

> or are you talking
> about rendering HTML?

Hell no!

> I think making 'improvements' like that to a message is a dubious matter at
> best because:
> a. it's not what the poster originally wrote, and so might obscure what
> they mean.

Hmm I don't think so. I know nobody who would write _this_ way without meaning 
underline.

> b. parsing things like that lends extra complexity to pan, which gives more
> opportunities for bugs to arise. not to mention, there are probably some
> wacky ways to misparse this stuff, which leads to all sorts of formatting
> errors.

Ok that's a point.

> c. it takes more processing cycles (maybe not much time on a 1GHz machine,
> but there are still people on older machines, and just on principle I hate
> CPU cycle wasteage).

Err in principle you are right but all in all it is not a very new feature. I 
think it is used even in CLI-readers like tin for some time and I never 
considered it to be very powerconsuming.
 
> d. what about copying text? what happens when you copy the 'modified' text?
> it's no longer what the poster originally wrote. there's no way to convert
> the text back from its 'modified' form, to its original form when it's
> copied.

Hmm this is correct I simply don't know what other newsreader are doing with 
this issue. I think they ignore this problem.

> e. I don't see any real benefit to it.

I do, but that's only my personal point of view. I now know that pan does not 
do it, because it is not wanted and that's ok. I don't consider this beeing a 
big issue, but I rather liked this feature in other newsreaders. 

Sebastian 

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