Re: format=flowed and extra spaces

Thanks, Gary, for your response. It made me realise something,
namely that Mutt itself seems broken wrt format=flowed. I'll turn to
the mutt-users list for that.

However, I did have one comment relating to Vim:

>Neither Vim nor mutt should do anything to messages to corrupt
>their contents. In particular, neither should automatically remove
>any leading spaces. See RFC 3676.

I am 100% with you on that. However, with Vim being the composer of
a message, I'd argue that there is no corruption of contents going
on, if it differentiates between displaying spaces, and saving them
to the file:

Let me elaborate, using · for spaces and $ for EOL:

Take the following paragraph.

| 1. This is a multiline |
| indented paragraph |

If &formatoptions doesn't include "aw", then we need those leading
spaces explicitly, because the indenting is done in such a way as to
hard-code it into the file. Therefore, Vim should save:

| 1. This is … a multiline$ |
| ···indented paragraph.$ |

However, if &fo=aw as well as &fo=n is in place, and there is a
trailing space on the first line, then I would say Vim should really
not be saving those spaces. Instead, the buffer should really be

| 1. This is … a multiline$ |
| indented paragraph.$ |

But this then gets displayed as in the original example, i.e. Vim
displays leading spaces, recognizing the numbered list.

Or at least this should/could be configurable. Don't you agree?

>If some receiving agent claims to support format=flowed, yet blindly
>includes sequences of spaces in the middle of flowed lines, as in
>your third example, I would say that agent is broken.

Oh great. Yeah, I'll let the GMail admins know at noreply@gmail.com.

>Also, your second example suggests that mutt is using
>quoted-printable encoding. RFC 3676 says that quoted-printable
>encoding "SHOULD NOT be used for Format=Flowed unless absolutely
>necessary...."

Unfortunately, PGP/MIME needs quoted-printable (mutt's
pgp_strict_enc), and so one could argue it is "absolutely
necessary".

I don't quite understand the ramifications of this though.

Best, and thanks again!

--
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if we have enough of them,
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even our gigantic intellects."
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