Andy Burns wrote:

> Sn!pe wrote:
>
>> Examples below:-
>>
>> http://www.example.url.com       <~~[original]
>
> That's me quoting your non-delimited URL in thunderbird

Still looks good to me (though personally I would delimit it)

Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> wrote:

> Andy Burns wrote:
>
> > Sn!pe wrote:
> >
> >> Examples below:-
> >>
> >> http://www.example.url.com <~~[original]
> >
> > That's me quoting your non-delimited URL in thunderbird
>
> Still looks good to me (though personally I would delimit it)
>

I can't explain that, I'll do some research...

.... Bother!

I've been maligning TB, it's ForteAgent/8.00.32.1272
that's doing it. Apologies.

--
^Ï^. – Sn!pe – <https://youtu.be/_kqytf31a8E>

My pet rock Gordon just is.

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

> Rich:
>
>> I suspect that Sn!pe's complaint is not the hard-wrap (my
>> own reply here is also hard wrapped), but instead is about
>> the even right justification by additional full space
>> insertion plus the auto-hyphenation. Those two, in a
>> mono-space context, make for severely ugly wordwrap.
>
> Did you mean /non/-monospace context, wherein this format is
> indeed horrible?

Well, your messages would look particularly bad in a variable-width
font, because your client is doing justification assuming a mono font,
but frankly it looks bad in a mono font too.

The first paper you posted the other day looked pretty good, but one
thing I noticed is that it had *no* hyphenation -- and your messages do,
a lot. Hyphenation is awkward to read. Frankly, given how wide spaces
are in a mono font, and how ugly hyphenation is, I think ragged right
edges look much better than oddly-spaced and over-hyphenated
justification.

john

On Tue, 29 Aug 2023 15:55:58 GMT
scott@alfter.diespammersdie.us wrote:
> I switched over to tin a while back when I could no longer get trn to
> compile. I have it running on a VPS that hosts my mail and websites. I
> ssh into that VPS, whether from a Konsole (KDE terminal) window under Linux
> or a WSL window running Gentoo Linux under Windows 11. In either case,
> double-clicking a URL will select it, upon which I can copy-and-paste it to
> transfer it into whatever browser I'm using.
>
> Whether this behavior is part of tin or part of the host terminal, I
> couldn't say. I think I could highlight and copy URLs out of trn in the
> same way, though, so it's likely a feature of the local host and its
> software, not the newsreader running on a remote host.

It's easy to test for this : just type a URL on the shell command line ,
click on it and see if it gets selected. If it's the terminal emulator
which offers the behaviour then its menus may offer options regarding
what happens when you click on a URL and possibly other things.

It almost certainly is the emulator. I can't even imagine how tin could
achieve this running on a remote host. I mean what mechanism could it use
to place something on the local X selection ?

--
vlaho.ninja/prog

scott@alfter.diespammersdie.us wrote:
> I switched over to tin a while back when I could no longer get trn to
> compile. I have it running on a VPS that hosts my mail and websites. I
> ssh into that VPS, whether from a Konsole (KDE terminal) window under Linux
> or a WSL window running Gentoo Linux under Windows 11. In either case,
> double-clicking a URL will select it, upon which I can copy-and-paste it to
> transfer it into whatever browser I'm using.
>
> Whether this behavior is part of tin or part of the host terminal, I
> couldn't say. I think I could highlight and copy URLs out of trn in the
> same way, though, so it's likely a feature of the local host and its
> software, not the newsreader running on a remote host.

Tin's built-in URL detection allows opening links with Shift-U.
I don't use it out of habit because I often want to open a link in
a tab of an existing browser window, and usually first in Dillo
then maybe in Firefox if it turns out to need Javascript and yet
I'm interested enough for that not to put me off.

The link handler program and visual highlighting can be controlled
in tinrc.

The Tin version I'm using finds links fine with or without <>.
Newlines break it though, so I only try to avoid those when posting
links myself. In a narrow terminal window, auto-wrapping of long
links can be another hazard for copy/pasting URLs though.

It seems that "selecting by word" with double-clicking is a feature
of Xterm, which most other terminal emulators for X have presumably
copied. In Xterm (and others) the behaviour is customisable by
specifying which charcters can be considered part of a word:
https://manpages.debian.org/bookworm/xterm/xterm.1.en.html#CHARACTER_CLASSES

--
__ __
#_ < |\| |< _#

Spiros Bousbouras <spibou@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 29 Aug 2023 15:55:58 GMT
> scott@alfter.diespammersdie.us wrote:
>> I switched over to tin a while back when I could no longer get trn to
>> compile. I have it running on a VPS that hosts my mail and websites. I
>> ssh into that VPS, whether from a Konsole (KDE terminal) window under Linux
>> or a WSL window running Gentoo Linux under Windows 11. In either case,
>> double-clicking a URL will select it, upon which I can copy-and-paste it to
>> transfer it into whatever browser I'm using.
>>
>> Whether this behavior is part of tin or part of the host terminal, I
>> couldn't say. I think I could highlight and copy URLs out of trn in the
>> same way, though, so it's likely a feature of the local host and its
>> software, not the newsreader running on a remote host.
>
> It's easy to test for this : just type a URL on the shell command line ,
> click on it and see if it gets selected. If it's the terminal emulator
> which offers the behaviour then its menus may offer options regarding
> what happens when you click on a URL and possibly other things.
>
> It almost certainly is the emulator. I can't even imagine how tin could
> achieve this running on a remote host. I mean what mechanism could it use
> to place something on the local X selection ?

After the last post, I kinda suspected it was most likely the terminal
emulator that was looking for something URL-ish when you click around in the
window. That said, there seems to be some way for certain kinds of mouse
events from the terminal to get passed through an SSH connection to be
picked up by curses/ncurses-based apps, as I remember being able to click
subjects to select them in trn. I don't know if tin supports this behavior,
but I wouldn't be surprised if it does.

As for tin and URLs, if it recognizes one, it usually highlights it as
inverse text.

--
_/_
/ v \ Scott Alfter (remove the obvious to send mail)
(IIGS( https://alfter.us/ Top-posting!
\_^_/ >What's the most annoying thing on Usenet?

On Wed, 30 Aug 2023 04:40:58 GMT
scott@alfter.diespammersdie.us wrote:
> Spiros Bousbouras <spibou@gmail.com> wrote:
> > It's easy to test for this : just type a URL on the shell command line ,
> > click on it and see if it gets selected. If it's the terminal emulator
> > which offers the behaviour then its menus may offer options regarding
> > what happens when you click on a URL and possibly other things.
> >
> > It almost certainly is the emulator. I can't even imagine how tin could
> > achieve this running on a remote host. I mean what mechanism could it use
> > to place something on the local X selection ?
>
> After the last post, I kinda suspected it was most likely the terminal
> emulator that was looking for something URL-ish when you click around in the
> window. That said, there seems to be some way for certain kinds of mouse
> events from the terminal to get passed through an SSH connection to be
> picked up by curses/ncurses-based apps, as I remember being able to click
> subjects to select them in trn. I don't know if tin supports this behavior,
> but I wouldn't be surprised if it does.

The mechanism is simply for the terminal emulator to send certain byte
sequences which correspond to mouse events to the application. It doesn't
matter if the application runs on the same computer as the emulator or the
bytes travel through an internet connection. It's the same mechanism used for
key presses , just the byte sequences are different and I think that the
application has to send first the appropriate sequence to the emulator to
indicate that it wants to receive mouse events. There is a getmouse man
page as part of ncurses .

> As for tin and URLs, if it recognizes one, it usually highlights it as
> inverse text.

--
How do you know that a webpage belongs to a postmodernist philosopher ?
It is constantly under deconstruction.

Sn!pe to Anton Shepelev:

> > Since Usenet predates web, clients need not be aware of
> > URLs to such a degree as to make them clickable
> > (presumably to open them in the default browser). I
> > don't think such newsreaders as tin, trn, or slrn
> > recognise URLs at all.
>
> What about News Message-IDs and References? If properly
> delimited, MacSOUP can automatically search its stored
> articles for a match on M-IDs.

Message-ID: is a system header, not part of the article
body. All remotely sane clients format that header
corretly. The requirements for it are much stricter than
for the formatting of URLs inside articles.

> MacSOUP displays your "beautifully formatted" text as you
> have sent it. It also quotes your text according to
> custom and usage. That quotation process makes your
> "beautiful" text look like a dogs dinner.

Just a small note here: my right-justrified text was quite
narrow -- 52 charactes per line -- which makes it quotable
over quite a few levels of nesting without any reflowing
whatsoever, but your client seems always to reflow.

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

Rich:

> Performing auto-hyphenation and space stuffing to make an
> even right edge with a fixed width font and a character
> cell terminal produces a very ugly output.

Hmmm, but manpages have been rendered this way for forty
years, e.g.:

<http://www.tin.org/bin/man.cgi?section=5&topic=tin>

And the Pascal newsletter switched form left-justified text
to right justified, rather than backwards:

#1: <https://www.standardpascal.org/pug_newsletter_01.pdf>
#27: <https://www.standardpascal.org/pug_newsletter_27.pdf>

Considering how technologically harder it is to hyphenate
and right-adjust text than to left-align without
hyphenation, the publishers and designers cerainly thought
the aesthetical improvement worth the work. I think that the
standard plain-text format with left justificatio and no
hyphenation became popular because it is the simplest
possible format supported in all text editors. And we know
that classic newsreader follow the Unix ideology in doing
their own job, delegating article composition to external
text editors...

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

Anton Shepelev <anton.txt@gmail.moc> wrote:

[...]

> > MacSOUP displays your "beautifully formatted" text as you
> > have sent it. It also quotes your text according to
> > custom and usage. That quotation process makes your
> > "beautiful" text look like a dogs dinner.
>
> Just a small note here: my right-justrified text was quite
> narrow -- 52 charactes per line -- which makes it quotable
> over quite a few levels of nesting without any reflowing
> whatsoever, but your client seems always to reflow.
>

MacSOUP reflows when I command it to do so.

As I said in an adjacent post:-
I've finished with this topic if you have?

--
^Ï^. – Sn!pe – <https://youtu.be/_kqytf31a8E>

My pet rock Gordon just is.

Sn!pe:

> I think we agree, Rich. If one cares enough about
> formatting to try to achieve block (brick) text when
> monospaced, the classical way is to use synonyms and word
> order, not the facile method of inserting extraneous
> spaces and hyphens.

This is like verse: one does not correspond in it on a daily
basis. These are not the times of Lucretius.

> That merely looks ridiculous when applied to Usenet News,
> particularly if quoted or read using a proportional font.

I agree that it is horrible when viewed in a proportional
font, but then a proportional font makes no sense for hard-
wrapped text... Leave it for high typography: troff, LaTeX,
&c.

> Perhaps Anton is more concerned about how his words look
> on his own screen rather than how they appear to his
> readers.

A good newsreader will take care to display posts as the
author saw them while composing. Proportional fonts of
course ruin everything, not only justification, but all the
graphical formatting and structuring on the rectangular grid
of a character-cell device. I once receviced a beautiful
ASCII scematic in response to a post about the topology of
an ultra-linear tube amplifier. The assumption of a
monospaced font greatly enhances the text medium.

--
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yeti:

> --
> |rom The Future. +++ Breaking News From The Future. +++ Breaking News F|
> | The USoA are switching to the binary number system because |
> | having more than 1+1 distinct digits is far too woke. |
> |+ #MABA + #makeAmericaBinaryAgain + #USA + #USoA + #woke + #MABA + #ma|

Observe that your signature separator does not end with a
space, as it shall per paragraph 4.3 of RFC 2646. Did
anybody complain about your signatures because they must be
viewed in a monospace font?

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

Sn!pe:

> As I said in an adjacent post:-
> I've finished with this topic if you have?

OK, I will not bother you about it anymore.

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

Anton Shepelev <anton.txt@gmail.moc> writes:

> Observe that your signature separator does not end with a
> space, as it shall per paragraph 4.3 of RFC 2646.

That must have been an edit glitch. The signature is auto inserted and
unless I ruin the --<space> line manually (this obviously may happen)
stays separated as planned.

> Did anybody complain about your signatures because they must be
> viewed in a monospace font?

No.

And you *may* view it in any strange font you want.

As only the formatting would screw up and the contents would not suffer
at all, I claim it is not worth spilling adrenaline over this.

....at least as long I don't split words or infinitives. ;-P

Stay ommmmPtimistic!

--
|rom The Future. +++ Breaking News From The Future. +++ Breaking News F|
| The USoA are switching to the binary number system because |
| having more than 1+1 distinct digits is far too woke. |
|+ #MABA + #makeAmericaBinaryAgain + #USA + #USoA + #woke + #MABA + #ma|