Emacs as an external flowed-text editor?

Emacs as an external flowed-text editor?

[Bjoern Voigt]

Hello!

I know that Emacs is capable of encoding and decoding of format=flowed
text within Gnus.

But I want to use Emacs as an external editor for text based mailers
like Pine or Mutt. In normal mode Emacs deletes the trailing spaces with
fill-paragraph (ESC-q) and in auto-fill-mode. But this trailing spaces
should be preserved for format=flowed text.

There is a library gnus/flow-fill.el in Emacs. But how can Emacs be
configured to use the library in text modes?

Björn

Re: Emacs as an external flowed-text editor?

[roodwriter]

Bjoern Voigt <bjoernvoigt@compuserve.de> writes:

> Hello!
> 
> I know that Emacs is capable of encoding and decoding of format=flowed
> text within Gnus.
> 
> But I want to use Emacs as an external editor for text based mailers
> like Pine or Mutt. In normal mode Emacs deletes the trailing spaces with
> fill-paragraph (ESC-q) and in auto-fill-mode. But this trailing spaces
> should be preserved for format=flowed text.
> 
> There is a library gnus/flow-fill.el in Emacs. But how can Emacs be
> configured to use the library in text modes?
> 
> Björn

I'm not exactly clear on what you're asking here. If you're asking for
a traditional word wrap with a carriage return (newline) just at the
end of a paragraph, like word processors do, then try longlines.el. I
just plopped it into my .emacs file, restarted and it works fine.

There are only a few instances when I have it turned off.

--Rod

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Re: Emacs as an external flowed-text editor?

[Bjoern Voigt]

roodwriter@core.com writes:

> I'm not exactly clear on what you're asking here. If you're asking for
> a traditional word wrap with a carriage return (newline) just at the
> end of a paragraph, like word processors do, then try longlines.el. I
> just plopped it into my .emacs file, restarted and it works fine.

Thank you for the tip with "longlines.el". I think it's possible to
compose e-mails with long-lines-mode. The mailer can do the special
format=flowed line wrapping after editing the message.

But I think, that long-lines-mode is not perfect, if I edit mails which
were already stored as a draft with format=flowed encoding or if I edit
replies with "> "-paragraphs.

The flowed format is defined in RFC 3676
(http://www.rfc-archive.org/getrfc.php?rfc=3676).

Flowed-text capable mailers wrap lines after 66 characters
(configurable) like other mailer too. But the flowed text format knows
two types of line breaks:

  Hard line breaks: <LF>
  Soft line breaks: <Space><LF>

I have attached the example output of emacs after calling the function
"fill-flowed-test" from gnus/flow-fill.el. 

http://user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~bjoern/emacs/fill-flowed-test.png

The trailing spaces are marked red in the screenshot. A flowed-text
capable program can adjust the line wrapping according to the window
width. Also a flowed-text capable editor preserves the trailing spaces
if it formats a paragraph. 

Because flow-fill.el is already in Emacs/Gnus it's clear that Emacs can
display and compose flowed text. But I don't know what I have to write
into my .emacs file to activate this mode. The "fill-flowed" function is
not interactively avaliable after loading gnus/flow-fill.el with
"load-file", "autoload" or "require".

Greetings, Björn

Re: Emacs as an external flowed-text editor?

[Mathias Dahl]

Bjoern Voigt <bjoernvoigt@compuserve.de> writes:

> Because flow-fill.el is already in Emacs/Gnus it's clear that Emacs can
> display and compose flowed text. But I don't know what I have to write
> into my .emacs file to activate this mode. 

I looked at flow-fill.el now and I don't see any mode in it.

> The "fill-flowed" function is
> not interactively avaliable after loading gnus/flow-fill.el with
> "load-file", "autoload" or "require".

What about just adding an interactive wrapper function so that you can
flow-fill the text when you want? Something like this:

(defun my-fill-flowed ()
  "Call fill-flowed in flow-fill.el."
  (interactive)
  (require 'flow-fill)
  (fill-flowed))

You can probably arrange for that (or the normal `fill-flowed' of
course) to be called when certain files or buffers open if you want,
if there is any such "rule" that you could match against.

/Mathias