On Tue, 29 Oct 2002 at 08:51:37AM -0500, Rich Greenberg wrote:
>
> Actually the RFC permits 1024 characters between lineends.

Not unless RFC821 has been superseded:

    4.5.3.  SIZES

[...]

          text line

               The maximum total length of a text line including the
               <CRLF> is 1000 characters (but not counting the leading
               dot duplicated for transparency).


Oddly, the message format RFC (RFC822) puts no limit on line length.


> > Some M$ products format paragraphs as a single line...
>
> Many mailers will automagically wrap lines for you.  Some are even nice
> enough to wrap at word boundrys.  The one I use (Mutt under unix) does
> that for displaying, but not for printing.  I added some to Mutt's print
> function to call a unix utility that will break at word boundrys for
> printing.  For those mutt users, I have this in my .muttrc:
>
>      set print_command="fold -s -w 79 | $HOME/bin/ansilpr -f"
>
> Where ansilpr is a shell script that inserts the VT100 print escape
> sequences ahead of the data and the off sequence after.

I also use Mutt under Linux :). I use par to format printed messages:

       set print_command="par 72gqr | lpr"

This command will print a messy message with long lines and bad formatting
that looks like this:

=======================================================================
  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.   **
        **********************************************
=======================================================================

as

=======================================================================
  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.                               **
        ****************************************************************
=======================================================================

Par is the best formating program I've seen (far better than fmt). It's
available in *nix and DOS versions at: http://www.nicemice.net/par/

BTW, using non-standard quote characters (you used "{") will prevent
formatting programs (e.g., par in default configuration) from working
correctly. Life would be simpler if everyone used the de facto standard ">"
as the quote character.

Regards,

-rex