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Re: Word Wrap

>There are folks whose text looks fine when the write it and fine when
>they read it in the APD batch mailings.  But in the archives, it is a
>different matter.  I think this is because when you look in the
>archives, you your browser but when you read the batch mailings, you do
>it with a mail program's (a mail server's) mail viewer -- e.g., I use
>Yahoo's mail server and it automatically wraps lines when I view my
>mail.  When I use Internet Explorer to view archive material -- and I

Just about all mail readers will automatically wrap text. Web browsers can
deal with other things, so they normally won't. It takes an HTML <br> tag
to make a line stop and restart on the next line, and if there aren't any
of those present in the web page's code, then the line will just be one
looong line.

What Actwin's archive thing is doing is to put all the body of the message
withing a <pre> </pre> block, which tells the web browser to treat
everything inside there as preformatted text -- that is however you write
it, that's how it will be displayed. Thus in mail readers that don't insert
carriage returns and linefeeds at the end of each line, the text will show
as one looong line.

A lot of mail readers will have an option talking about CR/LF (Carriage
Return / LineFeed -- the names come from the old typewriter and
daisywheel/dot matrix printer days) line termination. Maybe also something
about 80 column text. Depending on your mail reader, a setting something
like "end all lines with CR/LF" or "use 80 column text" will (should :-)
fix the line wrap problems. 

In Eudora, checking "line wrap" in sending seems to work.

In Outlook Express (and presumably full outlook too, but I don't have that
here to try), go into "Tools", then "Options", then click on the "Send"
tab. There is an option near the bottom of the box called "Automatically
wrap text at" <number>. Set this to something around 80 and you should be
OK. I haven't checked this since I use Eudora (or my web app at them moment
actually) normally.

>I know we're supposed to write about plants but I think this is
>important.  Some people just skip messages that are LLU and that
>lessens the discussion for all of us.  And some people have no idea
>that they're supposed to limit their line lengths, much less how to go
>about doing it.

I agree. I have skipped many messages that were several paragraphs of info
but only appeared on one line in the archives. I can't always just read the
digest either since if I leave a machine running a POP mail reader
somewhere it will suck down the digests automatically, and I usually send
replies while I'm in the field doing consulting work. One of these days
I'll start running IMAP on our mail server and this won't be a problem
anymore, but that's a whole 'nother set of problems ;-)

     -Bill

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Waveform Technology
UNIX Systems Administrator