Re: quoted text prefix(es)

["B. T. Raven" <ecinmn@alcisp.com>]

Thanks David. Supercite does too much for me. Since the very format of
your response (below) demonstrates the impracticality of my idea, what I
want now is what you suggest, but implemented automatically, something
like (strip-deep-cites n) where n is, say, the maximum number of
allowable > characters prefixed to a line. Then all groups of lines with a
greater number of > characters  would be collapsed to the sequence C-j
[...] C-j C-j. Do you know of something similar to that already
implemented in elisp. Unfortunately, however, most of supercite.el is over
my head.


"David Z Maze" <dmaze@mit.edu> wrote in message
news:y687iu88zx7.fsf@contents-vnder-pressvre.mit.edu...
> "B. T. Raven" <ecinmn@alcisp.com> writes:
>
> > Is there a way to replace the stacks of right pointing arrows prefixed
to
> > quoted text in gnus or rmail with an abbreviation?
> > E.g.:
> >>
> >>>
> > 3>
> > 4>
> > ...
>
> Honestly, best practice if you've got quoting that deep is to remove
> some of the really old stuff and just keep the past couple of replies'
> worth of context.  My experience from using Supercite long ago is that
> using non-standard quote characters makes it harder for other people
> to read and reply correctly, the ">>>>" format is sufficiently
> widespread that almost everyone can understand it and generate it
> (assuming their mailer is functional).
>
> > This would prevent text with many levels of nested quotations from
pushing
> > text so far rightward that it is forced to wrap prematurely.
>
> The usual M-q Emacs line-wrapping works fine for quoted text.
>
> > It seems that
> > it should be possible to convert to this format even email sent by a
> > non-conforming program:
> >
> > E.g.
> >
> >>4> is converted to 5>
> >>>6> .....  8>
>
> In principle this should be pretty straightforward with some Lisp and
> some regexp matching, but see e.g. `gnus-supercite-regexp' to see just
> how hairy the regular-expression matching can get.
>
>   --dzm