• synchronet message width

    From esc@21:1/112 to All on Wed May 15 05:30:01 2019
    I think Synchronet is unique insofar as how it deals with messages on FTN. I believe Synchronet was developed with the intention of making message traffic consumable in a web interface, which is slick. However, in FTN networks with some non-synchronet boards, what we end up with is sentences scrolling way
    past the 80 character mark (particularly when things are being quoted).

    I think it's unreasonable to expect all other BBS softwares to update themselves to behave like synchronet; I also think it'd be a regression to force synchronet to adhere to 80 character width limits.

    Is there a world where scanners can detect the past-80-character mark and
    just strip the extra text off the end to make things more readable? Also,
    does this annoy anyone else? Any time I see oddly formatted text in FTN messages, particularly when quoting is involved, I always smugly pat myself
    on the back noticing it's a synchronet board again.

    I admit I'm slightly OCD ;)

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A43 2019/03/03 (Windows/32)
    * Origin: Black Flag <ACiD Telnet HQ> blackflagbbs.com (21:1/112)
  • From apam@21:1/125 to esc on Wed May 15 19:59:08 2019
    However, in FTN networks with some non-synchronet boards, what we end
    up with is sentences scrolling way past the 80 character mark
    (particularly when things are being quoted).

    I have noticed this too, but I thought it had only started recently.

    I think it's unreasonable to expect all other BBS softwares to update themselves to behave like synchronet; I also think it'd be a
    regression to force synchronet to adhere to 80 character width
    limits.

    I don't know. Ideally BBS softwares would rewrap messages to fit the
    width of the viewer. 80 characters are common on IBM PCs, but commodore computers have 40 char width, which I suspect is where this started
    (synchronet added commodore terminal support recently)

    The problem I've yet to get my head around (I am terrible at word
    wrapping) is detecting hard wrap from soft wrap (not sure on the
    terminology) but the difference between when a FTN processor has wrapped
    at 80 columns vs the writer has pressed enter and wants a new line. WWIV
    I believe has special characters to indicate a word wrap.

    Ideally everyone would do it the same, and the synchronet way of letting
    the viewer wrap paragraphs vs some standard width is much easier (ie a
    carraige return is meant to be a hard wrap, and everything else is
    wrapped by how wide the screen is)

    Is there a world where scanners can detect the past-80-character mark
    and just strip the extra text off the end to make things more
    readable? Also, does this annoy anyone else? Any time I see oddly
    formatted text in FTN messages, particularly when quoting is
    involved, I always smugly pat myself on the back noticing it's a
    synchronet board again.

    I think just chopping of extra text would make readability worse not
    better, as the words wouldn't be there at all. But yeah it does annoy me
    a little bit, but mostly because I can't work out a way to make my
    software play nice with everyone.

    Andrew

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  • From Al@21:4/106 to esc on Wed May 15 03:17:00 2019
    I think Synchronet is unique insofar as how it deals with messages on FTN. I believe Synchronet was developed with the intention of making message traffic consumable in a web interface, which is slick. However, in FTN networks with some non-synchronet boards, what we end up with is sentences scrolling way past the 80 character mark (particularly when things are being quoted).

    Isn't that more or less the norm? The editor in BBBS writes paragraphs as one long line and the reader will wrap the text depending on the terminal width. That can be just about anything these days.

    Other editors I have used like golded work the same way.

    I think it's unreasonable to expect all other BBS softwares to update themselves to behave like synchronet; I also think it'd be a regression to force synchronet to adhere to 80 character width limits.

    It would be a good thing if BBSs/Readers/Editors all worked the same way but that's not always the case.

    Is there a world where scanners can detect the past-80-character mark and just strip the extra text off the end to make things more readable? Also, does this annoy anyone else? Any time I see oddly formatted text in FTN messages, particularly when quoting is involved, I always smugly pat myself on the back noticing it's a synchronet board again.

    We don't all have 80 character wide displays, so messages shouldn't be formatted for that. I don't think Synchronet is a bad player in all that.

    --- BBBS/Li6 v4.10 Toy-4
    * Origin: The Rusty MailBox - Penticton, BC Canada (21:4/106)
  • From apam@21:1/125 to Al on Wed May 15 20:42:32 2019
    Isn't that more or less the norm? The editor in BBBS writes
    paragraphs as one long line and the reader will wrap the text
    depending on the terminal width. That can be just about anything
    these days.

    That may be the case, but I suspect the mail tosser is formatting your
    message to 80 characters.

    Andrew

    --- MagickaBBS v0.12alpha (Linux/x86_64)
    * Origin: The Fat Sandwich - sandwich.magickabbs.com:2023 (21:1/125)
  • From Al@21:4/106 to apam on Wed May 15 04:14:38 2019
    Isn't that more or less the norm? The editor in BBBS writes
    paragraphs as one long line and the reader will wrap the text
    depending on the terminal width. That can be just about anything
    these days.

    That may be the case, but I suspect the mail tosser is formatting your message to 80 characters.

    Yep, Mystic is reformatting incoming messages, addings CRs to word wrap for an 80 column screen. Any messages going through mutil will have those CRs added to
    them even though they didn't have them originaly.

    --- BBBS/Li6 v4.10 Toy-4
    * Origin: The Rusty MailBox - Penticton, BC Canada (21:4/106)
  • From apam@21:1/125 to Al on Wed May 15 21:40:56 2019
    Isn't that more or less the norm? The editor in BBBS writes
    paragraphs as one long line and the reader will wrap the text
    depending on the terminal width. That can be just about anything
    these days.

    That may be the case, but I suspect the mail tosser is formatting yo message to 80 characters.

    Yep, Mystic is reformatting incoming messages, addings CRs to word
    wrap for an 80 column screen. Any messages going through mutil will
    have those CRs added to them even though they didn't have them
    originaly.

    Are you sure it's mystic and not BBBS? If it's mystic adding CRs and word wrapping then I would have thought the messages from synchronet would be
    too..

    Andrew


    --- MagickaBBS v0.12alpha (Linux/x86_64)
    * Origin: The Fat Sandwich - sandwich.magickabbs.com:2023 (21:1/125)
  • From Al@21:4/106 to apam on Wed May 15 05:06:00 2019
    Are you sure it's mystic and not BBBS? If it's mystic adding CRs and word wrapping then I would have thought the messages from synchronet would be too..

    Yes, Paul and I have done a bit of testing to see what's happening and we are (well, Paul is) going to bring it up with g00r00 to see if that can be done differenlty when he returns.

    It's OK to create messages that way if you like, and it's OK to format messages
    on your own BBS with word wrapping if you like.. but changing messages in transit is BadJuJu(tm).. :)

    I'm going to try to grab the pkt this message creates to send to 4/100 just to refresh my own memory but I don't think BBBS adds any CRs unless I press enter.

    I'm not sure becuase I haven't looked closely at SBBSs incoming/outgoing PKTs but I don't think SBBS changes messages in transit aside from needfull things like path & seen-bys. I could double check that if need be but I haven't seen reports of that.

    --- BBBS/Li6 v4.10 Toy-4
    * Origin: The Rusty MailBox - Penticton, BC Canada (21:4/106)
  • From Al@21:4/106 to apam on Wed May 15 05:13:32 2019
    Are you sure it's mystic and not BBBS? If it's mystic adding CRs and word wrapping then I would have thought the messages from synchronet would be too..

    I just had a look at the PKT that BBBS sent to 4/100 for the last message I posted and the PKT doesn't have any CRs until the end of the paragraph so no word wrapping in the original. If your inbound PKT had CRs then they were added
    somewhere along the way.

    --- BBBS/Li6 v4.10 Toy-4
    * Origin: The Rusty MailBox - Penticton, BC Canada (21:4/106)
  • From apam@21:1/125 to Al on Wed May 15 23:24:12 2019
    I just had a look at the PKT that BBBS sent to 4/100 for the last
    message I posted and the PKT doesn't have any CRs until the end of
    the paragraph so no word wrapping in the original. If your inbound
    PKT had CRs then they were added
    somewhere along the way.

    Ok. Yeah something is definitely happening along the way I can see this
    message looks more like the synchronet "wrapped" messages. Hmm,
    frustrating.

    Notice how this message has a carriage return after "added" and then a
    space before "somewhere", that confuses my wrapping (I unwrap then rewrap quotes so they fit inside 80 chars with the quote arrows). As my logic is
    that a line shouldn't start with a space if it's been wrapped (only if it
    was meant to be a new line).

    Oh well. I suspect even if mystic was fixed to stop altering messages,
    there would still be some that look odd. For example, quote lines. How do
    you insert the A> if it's one long line of quote, do you have the quote
    sign then a long line and let the reader format it with quote signs after wrapping?

    Heh. I've said it many times before - I hate word wrapping lol it's too complicated :)

    Andrew

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    * Origin: The Fat Sandwich - sandwich.magickabbs.com:2023 (21:1/125)
  • From Al@21:4/106 to apam on Wed May 15 16:08:38 2019
    I just had a look at the PKT that BBBS sent to 4/100 for the last
    message I posted and the PKT doesn't have any CRs until the end of
    the paragraph so no word wrapping in the original. If your inbound
    PKT had CRs then they were added
    somewhere along the way.

    Ok. Yeah something is definitely happening along the way I can see this message looks more like the synchronet "wrapped" messages. Hmm,
    frustrating.

    From what I have read lately in the sync_programming area the SBBS folks are working on this so comments and feed back would likely be appreciated there.

    I recall a lot of work on that also before the previous release, was it 3.15 or
    3.16 maybe or somewhere along that time frame.

    Notice how this message has a carriage return after "added" and then a
    space before "somewhere", that confuses my wrapping (I unwrap then rewrap quotes so they fit inside 80 chars with the quote arrows). As my logic is that a line shouldn't start with a space if it's been wrapped (only if it
    was meant to be a new line).

    Yep, I get the same zig zag quoting on BBBS to one degree or another at times. If I have the time I fix it up but if I'm in a hurry I let it be.. :)

    Oh well. I suspect even if mystic was fixed to stop altering messages,
    there would still be some that look odd. For example, quote lines. How do
    you insert the A> if it's one long line of quote, do you have the quote
    sign then a long line and let the reader format it with quote signs after wrapping?

    I just had another look at the PKT I was talking about yesterday and the lines with quotes have CRs at the end of the quoted lines. I don't really see a way around that.. :)

    Heh. I've said it many times before - I hate word wrapping lol it's too complicated :)

    I think B is in the same place. At a certain point things just get to complicated so he's left it at that, which I can understand.. :)

    --- BBBS/Li6 v4.10 Toy-4
    * Origin: The Rusty MailBox - Penticton, BC Canada (21:4/106)
  • From Blue White@21:4/134 to esc on Wed May 15 23:35:55 2019
    esc wrote to All <=-

    I think Synchronet is unique insofar as how it deals with messages on
    FTN. I believe Synchronet was developed with the intention of making message traffic consumable in a web interface, which is slick. However,
    in FTN networks with some non-synchronet boards, what we end up with is sentences scrolling way past the 80 character mark (particularly when things are being quoted).

    I have not noticed this with synchronet. I have noticed it (some) when
    quoting messages in Magicka's internal editor. I have also noticed that, sometimes, when I am using a QWK reader to quote a message it seems to run
    off the right of the page.



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  • From esc@21:1/112 to Al on Thu May 16 03:53:18 2019
    I just had a look at the PKT that BBBS sent to 4/100 for the last
    message I posted and the PKT doesn't have any CRs until the end of the paragraph so no word wrapping in the original. If your inbound PKT had
    CRs then they were added somewhere along the way.

    I just noticed something interesting - Mystic seems like it does some sort of word wrapping. Your initial message's last line was simply " added somewhere along the way", which means that me quoting here actually caused Mystic to rewrite your message to conform to having the "Al> " prepend.

    I also want to mention that " added" intentionally, in my case, has the space before it, which was definitely formatted wrong. There was no need for that.
    So there is an edge case in message displaying in Mystic where things end up
    a bit wonky, I suppose.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A43 2019/03/03 (Windows/32)
    * Origin: Black Flag <ACiD Telnet HQ> blackflagbbs.com (21:1/112)
  • From esc@21:1/112 to apam on Thu May 16 03:55:05 2019
    Heh. I've said it many times before - I hate word wrapping lol it's too complicated :)

    I also think there's a rabbit's hole one can go down with quotes of quotes of quotes, like, how should a BBS software or mailer or reader understand something like
    text that scrolls out to the end of the line
    ...when it's quoted by someone else? This all gets murky. Feels very under-standardized IMO.

    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A43 2019/03/03 (Windows/32)
    * Origin: Black Flag <ACiD Telnet HQ> blackflagbbs.com (21:1/112)
  • From apam@21:1/125.4 to esc on Thu May 16 18:16:05 2019
    I also think there's a rabbit's hole one can go down with quotes of
    quotes of quotes, like, how should a BBS software or mailer or reader understand something like 11> 22> 33> 44> text that scrolls out to the
    end of the line ...when it's quoted by someone else? This all gets murky. Feels very under-standardized IMO.

    Yep. It's a case of you just do what you can do, you can't get it right
    all the time. In magicka I rewrap direct quotes, but quotes of quotes
    just get truncated.

    Andrew


    --- MagickaBBS v0.12alpha (SunOS/i86pc)
    * Origin: Exotica BBS - Test Magicka BBS (21:1/125.4)
  • From Al@21:4/106 to esc on Thu May 16 05:11:44 2019
    I just noticed something interesting - Mystic seems like it does some sort of word wrapping. Your initial message's last line was simply " added somewhere along the way", which means that me quoting here actually caused Mystic to rewrite your message to conform to having the "Al> " prepend.

    Mystic (or mutil) seems to be word wrapping messages it forwards to links for an 80 character terminal. That's not a bad thing as long as you have an 80 character wide terminal but when you are forwarding messages somewhere else you
    have no way to know what the screen width is.

    I also want to mention that " added" intentionally, in my case, has the space before it, which was definitely formatted wrong. There was no need for that. So there is an edge case in message displaying in Mystic where things end up a bit wonky, I suppose.

    Word wrapping can get complicated, and then you run into a senario where someone has done it differently so you need to take that into account also.. and on it goes.

    All in all I found that Mystic does a good job of displaying text and word wrapping (as long as you have an 80 character wide terminal). The same is true when replying. Whenever I have been replying on Mystic the message display and wrapping is alsways good, never needs any fixing.

    --- BBBS/Li6 v4.10 Toy-4
    * Origin: The Rusty MailBox - Penticton, BC Canada (21:4/106)
  • From Digital Man@21:1/183 to esc on Mon May 20 17:34:34 2019
    Re: synchronet message width
    By: esc to All on Wed May 15 2019 01:30 am

    I think Synchronet is unique insofar as how it deals with messages on FTN. I believe Synchronet was developed with the intention of making message traffic consumable in a web interface, which is slick. However, in FTN networks with some non-synchronet boards, what we end up with is sentences scrolling way
    past the 80 character mark (particularly when things are being quoted).

    That's a problem with the software displaying the message text. As stated in FTS-1 (the primary FidoNet standard document):
    "Systems which display message text should wrap long lines to suit their application"

    I think it's unreasonable to expect all other BBS softwares to update themselves to behave like synchronet; I also think it'd be a regression to force synchronet to adhere to 80 character width limits.

    It's actually a matter of the message editor, not the BBS software. In this case, I'm using Deuce's fseditor.js, a full-screen editor written in JavaScript, for Synchronet and it's configurable as to whether it will output long-line paragraphs or insert CRLF's on wrapped lines. Other editors may behave differently or depend on sysop-configuration.

    Is there a world where scanners can detect the past-80-character mark and just strip the extra text off the end to make things more readable? Also, does this annoy anyone else? Any time I see oddly formatted text in FTN messages, particularly when quoting is involved, I always smugly pat myself on the back noticing it's a synchronet board again.

    I admit I'm slightly OCD ;)

    It sounds like the software you're using to view messages needs adjustment of some kind.

    digital man

    Synchronet "Real Fact" #90:
    Synchronet/DSZ "hack" of '93: http://wiki.synchro.net/history:hack93
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