In localhost.fanfic-ml you write:
On Sun, 8 Dec 1996, RPM - acct 3/5 wrote:
[ stuff about formatting text to fit the proper # of columns snipped ]
Um, although the standard may be that on RAAC, it should be 72 here.
Why? Because people quote bits of fanfic all the time back and forth,
and you should leave a little room for > marks the the beginning of
lines.
Good point. I'd say 70 to be conservative, but I like reading narrow
stuff anyway.
The only 'quick fix' to the width problem, a program by... Mike Loader, I
think... or was it Ben Kosse... drats, my apologies to the creator of that
program, anyways, that program still has one or two glitches left to iron
out.
[bit about using the semware editor / qedit to reformat every
paragraph snipped, as well as a bit about writing code to do it]
Actually, there's a very impressive-looking program to do this
already, in source form, called par. It's at
<URL:http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~amc/Par/>
A bit from the page:
[...]
For example, the command ``par 44gqr'', given the input:
John Q. Public writes:
> Jane Doe writes:
> >
> > May I remind people that this newsgroup
> > is for posting binaries only. Please keep
> > all discussion in .d where it belongs.
> Who appointed you net.god?
> I'll discuss things here if I feel like it.
Could you two please take this to e-mail?
**********************************************
** Main's Law: For every action there is an **
** equal and opposite government program. **
**********************************************
Would produce the output:
John Q. Public writes:
> Jane Doe writes:
>
> > May I remind people that this
> > newsgroup is for posting
> > binaries only. Please keep
> > all discussion in .d where it
> > belongs.
>
> Who appointed you net.god? I'll
> discuss things here if I feel like
> it.
Could you two please take this to
e-mail?
************************************
** Main's Law: For every action **
** there is an equal and opposite **
** government program. **
************************************
It appears to take care of some fairly tricky cases (like the .sig at
the bottom) quite nicely.
I believe it can use a number of different separators to determine
paragraphs, but I'm not sure which ones.
If you've got a compiler and the know-how to use it, this may (or may
not) be a good starting point for you.
bryan