Re: quoted text prefix(es)

[David Z Maze <dmaze@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