Re: Suggestions

[Steven L Baur <steve@miranova.com>]

>>>>> "Kai" == Kai Grossjohann <grossjoh@charly.informatik.uni-dortmund.de> writes:

>>>>> On 02 May 1996 16:31:07 +0200, "Ketil.Z" <ketil@ii.uib.no> said:
Ketil> Anyway, what I'd really like for [SR]Gnus, is to recognize,
Ketil> and do various things with different regions of a message.
Ketil> In particular, I'd like source code to be treated differently
Ketil> from text - perhaps according to defaults in text-mode versus
Ketil> cc-mode (other modes might apply)?

Ketil> Other things, like tables and such would be nice to
Ketil> recognize, too.  I guess the most important problem is
Ketil> knowing when to auto fill, and when not to.

This is a reasonable idea, but well beyond the scope of what Gnus 5.2
or Red Gnus ought to be doing.  There are enough hooks in Gnus to let
one experiment with different ideas.  Hopefully the Gnus API is going
to stabilize thus encouraging this kind of experimentation ...

Kai> I think this problem is AI complete if you want to do it properly.  I
Kai> propose the following view on this:

Kai> The author of a mail message wrote it in a monospaced (as opposed to
Kai> proportional) font.  The author of a message tries to make it
Kai> readable.  Therefore the rendition of a message that the author sees
Kai> can be expected to be rather readable.  Thus you shouldn't
Kai> second-guess that and just use a monospaced font for everything.

Reading mail in a variable width font can be amusing.  It definitely
puts .signature ASCII graphics in their place.  Composing mail is
another story though.

Kai> I'd imagine recognizing C might be rather easy: if the lines ends in
Kai> ";" it's C, if the prev and/or the next line is C and the line
Kai> contains "else", it's C, too.

Kai> But how would you tell the difference between English and Cobol in
Kai> "add a to b giving c"?

You could at least start with the heuristics that file(1) uses.
Another possibility is to extend the categories of MIME types.  I
believe TM already supports an Emacs-LISP text MIME type, for example.

What I would really hate to see is Gnus support of the equivalent of
``WINMAIL.DAT''.
-- 
steve@miranova.com baur
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