flowed text (was: Adding delsp=yes to Content-Type)

[José María Mateos]

On Sun, Jul 07, 2019 at 09:59:15AM +1000, Cameron Simpson wrote:

> I'm curious about your experiments with composing flowed text. I'm
> using vim invoked thus:
> 
>  vim \
>      -c 'silent 1,/^$/s/  *$//' \
>      -c 'set filetype=mail' \
>      -c 'set formatoptions=waqj'
> 
> which produces a ... workable experience. It is a little prone to
> minor breakage and I do go back to check for the trailing spaces used
> to mark flowed lines.
>
> I'd be happy to find improvements.
>
> What did you try, and how did it fail? What was good?

Right now this is my vim configuration for mail (not flowed, but 
fixed-with):

setl tw=72
setl fo=watqj
setl nojs
setl nosmartindent
setl noautoindent
" Mark trailing spaces, so we know we are doing flowed format right
"match ErrorMsg '\s\+$'
" Better way
"setl list
set formatprg=par\ 72q

Right now this makes for a quite pleasant experience too; I have to 
reflow replies manually so that par does its magic, but that's fine. I 
stopped using flowed format because I like doing stuff like this:

1. A list, in which the paragraph gets aligned to the first letter of 
   the block, so it's more noticeable. Otherwise it just looks like a 
   regular paragraph with a number at the beginning.

And, as far as I can tell, this cannot be done correctly with flowed 
text. Plus sometimes I send e-mails to lists that need to copy & paste 
code and one needs to be extra careful with that. In the end, I didn't 
find any obvious advantage to the flowed format (apart from the fact 
that, yes, it degrades gracefully when one's reading the e-mail on a 
phone or something like that) and I went back to this option.

Cheers,

-- 
José María (Chema) Mateos || https://rinzewind.org/