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⬅️ Previous capture (2023-12-28)
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Re: "gemi.dev/gemlog/2023-10-14-orbital-fox-redux.gmi Nice work..."
I agree those are all good reasons to use preformatted text to display the contents. However, I would raise one point: the email clients that I've used do apply word wrapping to overly long lines, in case the sender's client didn't wrap the message body. So when I read those messages, they were not super-long horizontally scrolled lines but regular paragraphs. (Personally, I also view all plain text emails with a proportional font, and it's usually just fine.)
I propose this formatting tweak: keep everything else the same, but if a line is longer than ~100 characters, insert newlines to word-wrap it to about 70 characters per line.
As an additional heuristic, you might consider checking if a line has 3 or more consecutive whitespace characters, which would indicate that it has some indentation or other pre-formatting applied. Those lines could be kept as is.
When it comes to Lagrange's preformatted blocks, they certainly could use some improvement. A per-block word wrapping option would resolve the readability issue altogether, for instance. The adaptive font sizing is basically a crutch to avoid having to horizontally scroll blocks, which has always been a bit glitchy. The original idea was to freely scale the contents (like the image viewer does) to fit into the horizontal space, but the text renderer doesn't support arbitrary font sizes. Hence, there are only regular and small monospaced blocks...
I am planning to improve this situation at some point, hopefully sooner than later.
2023-10-15 · 4 months ago
Yeah, I like that. Seems like a reasonable modification to make: Keep everything the same, and keep the content in a single preformatted section. However, if a line is longer than 100 or so charcters, and doesn't seem to have any specific padding/whitespace formatting, hard wrap it.
Let me try playing with this later
— gemi.dev/gemlog/2023-10-14-orbital-fox-redux.gmi
Nice work @Acidus. 👏 Since you are displaying the email contents as preformatted text, it may not (should not, IMHO) be wrapped by clients to fit on the screen, though. Any chance you can wrap the long single-line paragraphs to a shorter max width? Of course, on mobile devices, preformatted text is not great but I can understand why you'd choose to use it here.
💬 skyjake [...] · 5 comments · 3 likes · 2023-10-14 · 4 months ago