Subj : Re: From the past???
To   : Mike Powell
From : Jeff Thiele
Date : Mon Nov 07 2022 21:29:50

On 07 Nov 2022, Mike Powell said the following...
 MP> >A couple of other conventions of interest to me are the use of 80 columns
 MP> >posting, and the convention of using both upper- and lower-case letters. 
 MP> >are somewhat difficult to follow on the Atari 8-bit computers and PDP-8,
 MP> >respectively. But hey, whatever, right?
 MP> Either Synchronet, or some of the third party online editors that people
 MP> use with it, store messages in a string.  That is, you see it wrap on the
 MP> screen while you are entering it but, in reality, it is not wrapped. 
 MP> Since most FTN mail packets store messages in strings longer than 80
 MP> bytes, I am not sure it matters too much.
 MP> However, for folks like you and me, it can cause trouble.
 MP> SLMR and/or QWK is expecting things to have already been wrapped, which
 MP> can make it more difficult to read.  Since I am the one using the older
 MP> software to read the message, I figure it is my problem and I make due.

Normally, word wrapping is ok, but there is one prominent instance in which
it is not, and that's quoting quoted text. So if I quoted Aaron and you
quoted me quoting Aaron, the "AT>" (or however your system annotates a quote)
should appear after a "JT>" at the beginning of a line. If it were
word-wrapped, one would expect to see "JT>" at the beginning of each quoted
line, but the "AT>" could be located anywhere in a line. Generally, the
convention seems to be that if the quote marker causes a line to exceed 80
columns, then the line is truncated. However, sometimes the line is wrapped,
but with a carriage return at the end of the original line, so that when a
line is wrapped there are only one or two words on the second line.

Jeff.

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