Subject:
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Re: 8250 Search Sub
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.admin.general
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Date:
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Wed, 7 Jul 1999 22:33:30 GMT
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Viewed:
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556 times
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Hi Todd,
Sorry about the trouble my message has caused, I should have brought the
discussion up right here in admin.general. And it was rude of me to say
"stupidly"; I apologize!
To answer your comments --
I agree completely that Times or another proportional font is way more
readable. I also really like the graphic design of lugnet as it is now. I kind
of reacted badly when I started posting test messages with embedded "<pre>" and
"</pre>" keywords and saw them getting stripped out by the all-too-smart LUGNET
software. I wish there were a simple solution. I almost wish I could read just
the db.inv newsgroup in Courier and the rest in the proportional font.
For now I've found another solution that works for me, which is to subscribe to
the db.inv group as a read-via-EMAIL group. Maybe others will choose to do that
too. And of course most people can read groups via NNTP (not me, my firewall
administrator won't consider it.)
If you wish to work on the more robust solution, I'd support it, although the
"raw message" option (another option I didn't even notice!) is yet another
solution available to people right now. Since this is a problem only for
inventories, I'd say spend your time on something else!
It's true that my inventory lines don't always line up. I always leave at least
3 spaces in a row between the part description and the color(s). That's all I
need for my scripts to parse them accurately. If I put the color at the
beginning of the line I would have to leave lots of space for it because
sometimes it's long ("black with gray" for example) and honestly I consider
colors to be rather unimportant (I mainly use LEGO pieces to build MindStorms
robots, and all my robots are ugly! :-)
I don't want to use tabs because they're even less reliable than spaces:
- My editor is Emacs running under Linux and I have tabs set to 4 spaces per
tab. Most "normal" users have tabs set to 8 spaces.
- Tabs fail when you quote the message in a reply, because the "> " inserted
at the beginning makes all the lines start a couple characters farther over.
In lugnet.general, Todd Lehman writes:
> Are you sure it really did? I'm looking at the raw NNTP text article right
> now, and it doesn't line up in all cases. [...]
> If you took Steve's suggestion, and also used tab-delimited ASCII
> instead of spaces, it would probably all work out better.
> [...]
> This isn't stupid, although it may not be an appropriate way to display
> messages in that particular group.
> Nine out of ten news messages, being bodies of paragraph-based text, are
> actually more readable with the default variable-width font
> [...]
> A robust solution (which will come later) would be to store a preference on
> a user-by-user basis -- how do you want your messages displayed (what font)?
> Then you can just set that to <FONT FACE="Courier"> or <TT> or whatever. Or
> maybe it'll happen via CSS and you can just store a self-created CSS page on
> your local system.
>
> A workaround for now, anyway, is a new link that you can click on at the top
> of each message -- it says "View Raw Message" -- and clicking it pops up the
> entire raw NNTP message as a MIME content-type of "text/plain".
>
> --Todd
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: 8250 Search Sub
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| (...) But tabs are better than spaces when it's a program reading the data, instead of a person looking at the screen. Excel is going to handle tab-delimited data much more accurately than 3-space delimited data. But I'm guilty of posting (...) (25 years ago, 8-Jul-99, to lugnet.admin.general)
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