Re: Preformatting features of Emacs

[Sudish Joseph <sj@eng.mindspring.net>]

Paul Franklin writes:
> Hmm.  I've been really happy with filladapt.  It seems to do a better
> job than either gnus-article-fill-cited-article or
> message-fill-yanked-message, but it only does one paragraph at a
> time.  The real win is that it's smart enough to notice changes in
> citation levels and treat them as paragraph boundaries even if there's
> no line separating them.

The problem is that it's paragraph-oriented.  It craps out when fed a
region containing blank lines, by converting the blank line preceding
a paragraph into a space(!).  Try putting the region across the next 3
lines and filling it.

This is paragraph a.

This is paragraph b.

This is 
paragraph c.

This gets filled as:

This is paragraph a.
 This is paragraph b.
 This is paragraph c.

This makes "W w" an ugly transform for most messages I read.

This is because it wasn't a paragraph to begin with, of course.  I
have a patch that "fixes" this, but Kyle Jones sez we shouldn't be
calling it that way in the first place.

> Will changing gnus-article-fill-cited-article and
> message-fill-yanked-message to use filladapt if it's present address
> your concerns?  If not, could you be more specific as to why this is
> insufficient?

IMO, The Right Thing to do is exactly what Per stated.  His cite stuff
is far, far, far, far (etc, you get the idea) more knowledgeable about
mail and news citation boundaries (which is what we need, not
paragraphs in the usual sense) than filladapt is.  

It can mark such regions (I expect it already does this) and stuff
like "W w" should be iterating over such regions and feeding each
region separately to the fill functions.

-Sudish