Hi Ann,
On 4 Apr 2004 at 9:11, Ann Parsons spoke, thus:
> Sabahattin, I find that this is a problem for me as well. I find that it
> is extremely difficult to read BN users' email with speech if the lines are
> not wrapped.
[Snip]
> Is there something that can be done about this?
VM can run in Emacs? Amazing! I guess that's why people like EmacsSpeak
so much - you can speechify more or less everything. Kind of like what
the BrailleNote should be... but we won't go there, not yet. To answer
your question, your first port of call is your agent's features.
Somewhere, the mailer must have a "Wrap long lines" or even "Reformat long
lines" to the width of the buffer - certainly I am aware that Emacs can do
the latter using GNU FMT. If you find no simple keypress to do either of
these things, then try exporting the message out to a flat ASCII file and
then using GNU fmt from a shell buffer. The simple form will be something
like "fmt myfile>myfile.out" - I'm probably wrong though, so beat me to a
reading of the manual page ("man fmt"). FMT is a part of coreutils, and
is 99.9 percent likely already installed on your system.
> I don't use my BN for email. If I did, I'd probably not experience the
> problems because you all are reading your stuff as a continuous line of
> braille.
It's not so much a question of braille or speech, and there's no guarantee
you would in fact read your email correctly, even with your BrailleNote.
I am an example of this very point. There is a really quite high chance,
though, you'll need to experiment to see for yourself. If the system that
delivers your mail, or systems further out which handled your mail, could
not process long lines then there is a possibility your email will be
corrupted in some way even before you download it. This is why I say to
people to wrap their lines - there's an offchance that even if the user
uses a modern mailer and can in fact wrap their own text, it may not be as
sent by the sender, and assuming it as such is plain bad. The reasons for
all this are historical, and revolve around terminals and their character
dimensions and consequently the historical and/or limited behaviour of
some mail transports. In any event, the BrailleNotes are not wrapping
text, leaving open the chance that the email will be corrupted when the
recipient receives it, as with me - I know how to wrap the mail, but it is
broken up in places where my system has choaked and reset the carriage.
Only Microsoft programs have exhibited this default style of message
format, so you can be grateful to them for building the API and operating
system in your bN. Since this list is full of non-wrapping zombies, I
have been obliged to plead with the author of my mail system to include a
feature to dynamically handle line lengths - I'm pretty certain he won't
approve. He's old school, and too right.
Cheers,
Sabahattin
--
Thought for the day:
Book (n): a utensil used to pass time while waiting
for the TV repairman.
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