Re: [Pan-users] Howto unwrap text in body pane to available space

[Duncan]

ashwin kesavan posted on Sat, 03 Aug 2013 12:20:37 +0530 as excerpted:

> I am using pan 0.139 . I have a big screen. I see that pan wraps text in
> message to 80 char or something like that. How do i make pan text to
> fill the available space in body pane ? Like free floating text. I am
> unable to find a setting that can do this. My searches on google haven't
> produced anything useful.

Please turn off the HTML.  There's a reason pan discourages posting in 
HTML.  If you can't honor it for your normal posts, please at least do so 
on the pan list, as a lot of people use pan to /read/ the pan list (via 
gmane.org's list2news service, here), and raw HTML just looks ugly.  If 
it's worth reading at all, it's worth reading in plain text, and 
conversely, if you have to dress it up in HTML to make it worth reading, 
it's NOT worth reading, so "just don't do it!"

Pan has a togglable wrap option, but depending on the original post 
format, I'm not sure it'll do what you want.

In one mode, pan doesn't wrap at all, presenting the text as it was 
posted.  That means if it was posted with hard-wrap at 80 characters, 
that's what pan will show.  If it was posted with 1000 character long 
lines, that's what pan will show in this mode too, and you'll have to do 
a lot of horizontal scrolling unless you have pan's body pane spread 
across multiple terminals so it's wide enough to show 1000 character 
lines without scrolling.

This unwrapped mode is best for displaying mono-space formatted
ASCII-art, tables with aligned columns, etc, and sometimes is needed to 
align these properly even in posts that need wrapped for ordinary prose.

In the other mode, pan does its own rewrapping to the standard just under 
80 characters, regardless of what the original post was wrapped at.  This 
is best for ordinary prose where rewrapping doesn't change the semantic 
content.

But there's no mode that wraps to the arbitrary window width regardless 
of whether that's 20 or 220 characters, and I think that's what you're 
asking for.


What I've found, however, is that for large wide windows, multi-pane 
layout with the body pane beside the group pane so neither one is full 
width, with a full-width header pane to best display all possible columns 
with the subject and author columns both quite wide to better display 
longer names, seems to work best.

ASCII-art of my layout:

----------------------------------------------------------------
| s a subject                  author   date bytes lines score |
|--------------------------------------------------------------|
| o x header pane              duncan   now  xx    yy    --    |
|                                                              |
|                                                              |
|                                                              |
|                                                              |
----------------------------------------------------------------
| body pane                         | group pane               |
|                                   |                          |
|                                   |                          |
|                                   |                          |
|                                   |                          |
|                                   |                          |
|                                   |                          |
----------------------------------------------------------------

Of course the header pane could be below or the group pane to the left, 
if it fits your style better...

The body pane is set to ~90 character width, so wrapped text doesn't look 
too out of place.  The group pane can have the abbreviated group names 
option turned on or off depending on how long your subscribed group names 
actually are, and how much space you have left to display it beside the 
body pane.  The header pane is full width, thus allowing longer than 
average subject lines to display fully or nearly fully, without crimping 
the author column too much or forcing omission of some of the less 
important columns.

A screen shot (note that I run triple stacked full-HD monitors, so it's 
pretty big, 3240x1960, also, moderate possibly NSFW warning due to 
swimsuit model firefox skin) can be found at:

http://wstaw.org/m/2013/05/11/duncan-fullscreen.png

Pan is of course on the middle monitor, there.

(The top monitor is 21", the two bottom monitors are actually 42" TVs, 
thus the far larger fonts in the superkaramba system monitoring theme on 
the top one.)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman