What's your preferred fill width? How many people still view Usenet on
80-char terminals?

Using gnus for email/usenet, I've noticed that hard wrapping has
unfortunate effects when viewed on a mobile client, since they're often
only 45-50 characters wide, so a 60 char line wraps very poorly.
(alternating ~45 and ~15 character lines). The apparent solution of
using HTML to get dynamic wrapping also feels wrong. (Do any usenet
clients even support HTML or other MIME types?)

Or is there any way we could 'soft wrap' lines, such that if your client
is wrapping the lines itself, it doesn't wrap on both the lines that are
too long *and* the sender's indicated wraps?
I'm envisioning a compromise between hard-wrapped lines, and the block
paragraph model of org-mode/markdown/latex that treats a contiguous
sequence of lines as a paragraph (need a blank line or a special line
wrap character to actually force a wrap).

But unless there's already a solution I'm unaware of it's not likely to
help, since any new solution would require client support.

--
Not really sure why I'm manually adding a signature...
-shcv

Am 18.09.2023 um 14:25:21 Uhr schrieb Samuel Christie:

> What's your preferred fill width? How many people still view Usenet on
> 80-char terminals?

Many still want it not more than 72 chars.
I doubt that they still use small screens.

Although right now I'm using Thunderbird, I occasionally use slrn in an
80 char window.

IMO it should be the clients duty to wrap lines. I know not all clients
do this, but there's no technical reason, it's just tradition, I guess.
Interestingly, Thunderbird automatically wraps lines at the last word
before 72 characters, but it doesn't seem to actually post as 72
character lines, instead letting the reader's client determine line
length.

Oh, and Thunderbird also supports HTML in posts, but I've only seen one
person actually use it, and they're fairly obnoxious.

--
~rdh

rdh <rdh@tilde.institute> writes:

> IMO it should be the clients duty to wrap lines. I know not all clients
> do this, but there's no technical reason, it's just tradition, I guess.
> Interestingly, Thunderbird automatically wraps lines at the last word
> before 72 characters, but it doesn't seem to actually post as 72
> character lines, instead letting the reader's client determine line
> length.

Interesting. Looking at the source of your message, it *seems* to be
using hard line wraps at 72 characters (but I could be misreading, and
my client is still modifying the supposedly raw view). Also interesting
was that it apparently sets "format=flowed".

Looking that up brought me to this article:
https://www.fastmail.com/blog/format-flowed/
and this RFC:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3676

The article was from Fastmail about what it is, and why they don't plan
to implement it. They mention potential issues with reflowing code,
which makes sense, but looking at the RFC that shouldn't actually be a
problem.

The format=flowed solution looks like it should be close to what I was
looking for as a solution that could support client-side line wrapping
without looking bad on clients that don't support it, but I haven't
finished reading it in detail.

Samuel Christie <shcv@sdf.org> wrote:
>
> What's your preferred fill width? How many people still view Usenet on
> 80-char terminals?

I still prefer limiting the initial text width to 72 chars.

I'm reading on 80 chars, but not a real 80-char terminal. I'm in a tmux
session with two splits which are 80 chars wide.