Re: [flow-fill.el] Filling of quoted blank lines

[Ralf Angeli <dev.null@iwi.uni-sb.de>]

* Ralf Angeli (2003-12-02) writes:

> there are quite some people out there using Mozilla with
> `format=flowed' enabled.  This is handled nicely by `flow-fill.el'
> except when it comes to quoted blank lines.  Mozilla is quoting them
> with `> \n' where `flow-fill.el' sees soft line breaks at the end. The
> lines are filled and disappear.  You can have a look at an example in
> comp.text.tex; the MID is <news:bqia0o$2tm$02$1@news.t-online.com>.
> Compare the display of the message using `C-u g' and `g'.  In the
> latter case some lines are missing.
>
> Is this the intended behaviour?  I find it a little bit irritating and
> sometimes don't even want to answer such posts as I am afraid that
> Gnus messes up the text.

I'd like to revitalize this rather old thread as I am occasionally
still seeing this.  An example were Gnus really messes up the display
is [1].  The raw message looks like this:

,----
| Frank Küster wrote:
| > "Tino Langer" <tino.langer@tournex.de> schrieb:
| > 
| > 
| >>Wie heißt denn der Zähler für die Tabellen - ich habe das leider nicht
| >>gefunden.
| > 
| > 
| > Damit kannst du höchstens das Symptom kurieren, aber nicht das Problem
| > lösen. Und früher oder später treffen dich dann andere Symptome des
| > gleichen Problems.
| 
| natürlich löst er damit das longtable-Problem, so es das ist.
| 
| Herbert
`----

And the result displayed by Gnus looks like this:

,----
| Frank Küster wrote:
| > "Tino Langer" <tino.langer@tournex.de> schrieb:
| > 
| >>Wie heißt denn der Zähler für die Tabellen - ich habe das leider nicht
| >>gefunden.
| > Damit kannst du höchstens das Symptom kurieren, aber nicht das
| > Problem
| > lösen. Und früher oder später treffen dich dann andere Symptome des
| > gleichen Problems.
| 
| natürlich löst er damit das longtable-Problem, so es das ist.
| 
| Herbert
`----

The original message was produced by Mozilla.  I managed to find a bug
description[2] in Mozilla's bug management system where the developers
express their views upon this kind of quoting, i.e. their
interpretation of RFC2646.  The important note is comment #5 made by
Ben Bucksch:

,----
| I would interpret
| <quote src="ftp://venera.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc2646.txt">
| 4.4.   Space-Stuffing
| [...]
|    On reception, if the
|    first character of a line is a space, it is logically deleted.  This
|    occurs after the test for a quoted line, and before the test for a
|    flowed line.
|    [...]
|    Other lines MAY be space-stuffed as desired.
| [...]
| 4.5.  Quoting
| [...]
|    Note that because of space-stuffing, the lines
|        >> Exit, Stage Left
|    and
|        >>Exit, Stage Left
|    are semantically identical; both have a quote-depth of two, and a
|    content of "Exit, Stage Left".
| </quote>
| in the way that ">> " is a space-stuffed, quoted and empty line and thus not
| flowed.
`----

I am sharing this view.

As it is currently a bit annoying that `flow-fill.el' doesn't behave
like this I thought about an option to disable it completely as a
quick fix.

If I understand it correctly this could be done by adding another
check to `mm-view.el' (mm-inline-text) in the `when' statement just
before `fill-flowed' is called (line 348).  But this would need a new
defcustom or defvar. (First I thought about abusing
`fill-flowed-encode-column' but it doesn't seem suitable due to its
intention mentioned in the doc string and because it is not available
before `flow-fill.el' is loaded.)

Regards,
Ralf

Footnotes:

[1] <URL:http://groups.google.com/groups?as_umsgid=%3Cbu3nuh%24g2d%2407%241@news.t-online.com%3E>

[2] <URL:http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=43455>

-- 
 Moo!
     `~~_.
______',,/______ No Gnus is good news.