Re: Fwd: Re: wrap problem [albrecht.dress@arcormail.de]

[Albrecht Dreß <albrecht dress arcormail de>]

Am 27.07.2001 15:48:26 schrieb(en) M . Thielker:
> IMHO, paragraphs should be delimited by a single \n. This is the notion
> supported by most word processors today. Hitting <enter> ends a paragraph.
> The end of a paragraph must not always be a blank line. I always use text
> entry fields as if that were the case, and I don't like them to behave
> differently. If I type a single \n, I don't want that to be removed by
> "reflow paragraph". If there's a \n, it's there because I meant there should
> be one, it's not an option, I want it there. Programs shouldn't try to
> second-guess humans, they should do as they're told.

Now think of the following:

(1) Type a really long mail, separating paragraphs by a single <enter> == \n.

(2) Do a "reflow body". Now at the end of each line you will find additional
\n's. This means that you virtually lost the information where a paragraph and
where a line ends.

(3) See that you missed to type some stuff in one paragraph, so type this text
in...

... and now you want balsa to reflow exactly this paragraph... I now more or
less understand what happens since the last patch. Because there are \n's in
the text, the relow code interprets them as "hard" paragraph breaks and does
not process them.

IMHO, the delimiter for a paragraph is essentially a blank line: a newline,
maybe followed by whitespace chars, plus an other newline ("\n\s*\n" in PCRE
syntax). At least I use this layout. A solution might be to add an option
(check button in the outgoing mail options) "paragraphs are separated by a
blank line" which switches back to the old behaviour?

> While I'm at it, I found another issue in the compase text area as well.
> Sometimes, when I mark multiple lines using the keyboard and delete them,
> the preceding line will be visually blanked, or only the first character
> will remain. Entering that line with the cursor or resizing the window will
> make it reappear. Has anyone else seen this?

Yes, it seems to be a gtk+ problem (I saw it in gedit too). Maybe there is a
redraw event missing...

Cheers, Albrecht.


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