Re: [Pan-users] underlines etc in pan

[Gollum]

Sebastian Fischer wrote:

> Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom wrote:
> > are you talking about automatically converting plain text which
> > looks like'*word*' or '_word_', and underlining or bolding it?
> 
> Yes this ist what I mean.

I think that would be a nice feature, provided that it's a
user-selectable option.

Don't forget /italics/.

> > a. it's not what the poster originally wrote, and so might obscure
> > what they mean.

This may be a problem when discussing source code with pointers or
labels starting with "*" or "_", if the implementations is too
ambitious.

And of course it may be a problem when discussing topics like this,
therefore is should be an option.

> > [..] there are probably some wacky ways to misparse this stuff,
> > which leads to all sorts of formatting errors.

The implementation shouldn't be too ambitious.  For instance,
underlining shouldn't cross spaces or line feeds:
_This_text_should_be_underlined_  but  _this text should not._
*This* *text* *should* *be* *bold*  but  *this text should not.*

> > c. it takes more processing cycles (maybe not much time on a 1GHz
> > machine, but there are still people on older machines,  [...]

Unless the implementation is exceptionally inefficient, I don't believe
this should matter even on older machines.  We're talking about
displaying a single test message, not traversing an entire group.

> > d. what about copying text? what happens when you copy the
> > 'modified' text?

Again, it could be solved by making it an option, available through the
"View" menu.

When replying, the quoted text should always be shown in the original
form in the compose window.