How to set wrap for textmode

[Johan Wevers]

You, Nick Andriash, wrote:

> I'm not sure if I explained myself properly. When you draft a message and
> send it, it has to be wrapped, does it not?

Yes, but not by the software but by the user. Or by the editor the user
uses, but it should not be changed AFTER the user has pressed on save or
send. Programs that create one long line per paragraph without a "\n" on
the end but give the visual appearance the message is wrapped are IMO flawed
for use with mailers.

> That wrapping in most cases (TB!'s WYSIWYG Editor uses hard returns so
> there is no behind the scenes

As it should be. When I mail from my winodws machine at work I manually
put in the enter key (I use Netscape 4.75 on that machine).

Not using hard returns causes messages to look formatted like

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXX
XXXXXXXX

when I receive them on my Linux machine.

>> It's nut gnupg's responisbility to bypass the bugs of other editors or
>> mailreaders.

> No, but if GPG is going to sign the message before it's wrapped, then the
> signature will fail because the text has been altered.

That's a bug of the mailer then, it should not alter messages by itself.

> GPG must then account for that by somehow making sure nothing happens to
> the text once it's been signed...

Then don't use clearsigning. 

>>If he's affraid about that he should format the message
>>himself before signing.

>But how does he do that if the formatting of the message doesn't take
>place until after he's hit the Send button?

Use hard returns within the windows mailer. I don't see the problem here.
Except for people who don't use a fixed-width font for mail perhaps, but
that's a bad habbit anyway.

> Perhaps this kind of thing doesn't take place in Unix style Mail Clients.
> <shrug>

Maybe it does in Netscape for unix, but I've never testet that. Mutt and
elm don't mess with the formatting of the message that the editor delivers
to them.

> Hmmm? It's been in all the 6.x versions that I know of, and GnuPGShell has
> a similar feature for use with GPG.

I never used a 6.x version of pgp. I could not get the Linux source to
compile, and the precompiled binaries were libc6 only (my libc5 system
didn't even recognize them as ELF executables). I mail on a regular basis
with people using windows pgp versions (6 and 7), but there the encryption
is much more important than the signing so this problem does not occur
there.

-- 
ir. J.C.A. Wevers         //  Physics and science fiction site:
johanw@vulcan.xs4all.nl   //  http://www.xs4all.nl/~johanw/index.html
PGP/GPG public keys at http://www.xs4all.nl/~johanw/pgpkeys.html