ebay blingers

heyyyyyy that aint bad! :) not very pimped as it looks to standard, i'm looking for already pimped rather than pre-pimped

there's a pimped one down my way in red with lots of chome with small 5 spoke alloys to match, 2 tone painted alloys too, chrome rim and red centre.

Oooh. That's like, really nice and stuff !

Underpowered s**te.

IS300 would be great, if there was a manual. 200bhp isn't enough to overcome the Auto transmission :(

I'm never sure about those. Odd lookers !

format=flowed; charset="iso-8859-1"; reply-type=original

Try Tools > Options > Send > News Sending Format > Plain Text Settings set to Unicode - s'what I have.

Cheers.

I dunno what this one does, "flowed". Means nothing in plain text so Mickeysoft might be making it do anyting.

That's just character set. Plain text is US ascii with nothing whatsoever aside from that. But, the moment someone puts a £ sign in, the game is over because US ascii doesn't have GB Pound signs. Hence most readers switch from 7 to 8 bit character sets and they have to tell the other readers what they are using so the other readers can insert the extended characters in the right places.

I'm guessing this will get through ok even though it is iso-8859-1, yes?

The line length is usually set somewhere in the preferences, options and similar. With my reader, Agent, I see whatever is posted (and yes, Vamps are wider than they should be). With Outlook Express the lines are often resized before you even see them, etc, all a right mess.

The big problem with OE in line length is that so long as you set your line length longer than everyone elses, it will all look ok to you, however badly it makes your posts look to everyone else. It also happens when the editor is working in proportional spaced, or small sized, fonts with a printer defined line length. The classic one here is when the document that in word 7 looks just fine to everyone in one office, in another office where they all have a different printer, the last word on each line wraps onto the next, doubling the number of pages and shafting the presentation.

Vamp, check to see if you can find a line length in the options, someone else on OE will be able to help, but I dunno where to look having sworn off OE many years ago. This setting should be something a bit shy of 80 characters, back from the days when computer screens were actually 80 characters wide rather than graphical. To leave space for border characters and text box surrounds, most readers will default to 76 as a line length. I think I'm set to 79, which sometimes makes incautious OE users wrap my text wrongly. You're more like 95 which is way over. :)

I'm using OE+QuoteFix and Vamp's posts all look very odd whereas the majority of other posts made with OE don't.

His posts usually manage to reformat the quoted section (but just the previous poster's bit, not the previous previous poster IYSWIM) as well, changing them from 76 to 95+ wide.

That's in Tools > Options > Send > News Sending Format > Plain Text Settings as well.

adjusted so now set to 76 :)

That'll probably sort the wide posts, but won't help on your quoting because, and I think there is no way to turn this off, OE also insists on reformatting quotes even though this always means they must start word wrapping because you have to add >>> onto the front, tipping them over the 76 character line length.

Whereas, for contrast, Agent wot I use, limits my posts to 79 chars (or whatever I've set it to) but leaves quotes well alone as they can exceed the line length, and otherwise they become horribly foxed.

work when the programmers thought about what to wrap.

Is that a single line still? Probably not in OE.

In OE+QuoteFix it is.

I do - is that a problem?

Also, while we're talking about these things - what is it that makes people's posts not have the ">" signs (greater than sign for those on a Chinese character set) when being replied to? As that's mildly annoying too.

Peter

-- "The humble bic biro draws 13 beards, 9 devil moustaches and 49 penises on newspapers in its lifetime."

No, that's the correct setting.

They choose to use a different quote character.

It's something that happens in OE.

It's connected to the line length issues, too, interestingly enough, because it is the use of soft quotes that apply to a block of text so that that can be re-wrapped to a page dependent on the selected default printer carriage width.

Since you would make a mess with the quote characters if you just rewrapped, MS invented the soft quote, so that a block of text contains no carriage returns, no quote markers, and no line width. When displayed on a particular user's screen, it will have a font, font size, page width, etc, defined locally and the block would then be repaginated to fit that. Quotes would then be added to the block as a whole.

This tactic works fairly well in word processing because it is intended to be printed and most printers are the same size. It fails miserably in usenet because everyone has their own format and many users / boxes are following proper open standards and protocols, e.g. you won't hit this problem in unix.

Quite what sets it off is unclear but I'm guessing the use of high asci characters like the euro - ? or similar jolt OE into entering HTML mode rather than plain text.

I.e. I think this post will be hard to quote. But it's inconsistent and the people I've tried to test it with tend not to understand computers all that well, so I don't really know.

Looks OK from this end - how was it for you?

That's a euro sign like this - ? - in the line above.

Came out as a question mark on both occasions.

Although I think I have OE fairly well licked into shape regarding 7-bit plain text - it doesn't try to render HTML now, either in news or mail.

Sure.

I think that's probably why you can't see the euros, a euro is not something you get in US ascii - which is what plain text should be. My newsreader manages to do euros and plain text without getting into difficulty elsewhere. Horses for courses.

There are quite a few people who believe OE is not really all that good as a newsreader, personally I've gotten used to the fact that OE users as a group tend to butcher quotes, etc. Easier to not bother about it. I can't really criticise using something that works sort of well enough and is free.

I managed quoting this fine. I'm not sure that people quite get what I'm saying - I'm not on about using different characters to the ">" (greater than) - more like not using them at all when quoting, i.e nitto. Niente.

Peter

-- "The humble bic biro draws 13 beards, 9 devil moustaches and 49 penises on newspapers in its lifetime."

Well, when you post a reply to something, what should happen is that your newsreader should put a ">" on the front of every line in the entire original and then let you delete as you see fit, adding your own parts without a ">".

I'll grant you it isn't obvious, but nothing else should happen.

1) If the quoted block of text does not have ">" added to the front of every line, your newsreader is failing to do this. 2) If the quoted block of text is repaginated / rewrapped to some line length that obviously wasn't what was posted, your newsreader isn't presenting it properly. 3) If the text is then quoted with the words all rewrapped wrongly as in 2, that is a fault in your newsreader. 4) If the text you see has ? instead of things like euro symbols, (like this one -> ? ) this is either a fault in your newsreader, or the original poster is secure enough in his technical savvy to be winding you up about what the message contains - but anyone not using Microsoft products will usually spot that this is happening (ditto for deliberately butchered originals to look bad when quoted.)

As a detailed description, consider this quoted block:

It's obvious to me even without seeing it happening with a functional reader that the original wasn't five lines long, but three, and that the words "the" and "that" have been erroneously wrapped onto the next line, I can even tell you the line length you have set is between 74 and 77 or thereabouts, because it is adding a character on the front and then wrapping to your line length, which butchers the quoted lines by shifting one word from the end of each line onto its own line.

It goes without saying that this isn't how I formatted the original. Not to worry, though, it's just what OE does to newsgroup posts. Play with pretty much any other newsreader and it all works perfectly (and it becomes obvious quite how it ought to work and why OE is so badly Kia. While using OE, it seems like everyone else is posting wrong.)

You don't have to pay for this, eudora, agent, etc, they're all free AFAIK. Although, Agent loses features if you have the free version for months. Dunno about the others, some are free permanently (like firefox.)

I think AstraPeterManVan is talking about when OE does something funny and goes to HTML mode when replying but doesn't send the post in html so you end up reading a message that has no distinction between quoted text and text added by the poster. It's very annoying but doesn't seem to happen often. Such posts are often made (IMO) by people who are not really worth listening to anyway. (c:

I dont think its anything to do with euro symbols myself or ascii characters, I think its misconfiguration.

I used OE for a good while and it only did it to me a few times, I didn't post the messages that it happened to I dont think.

IIRC Firefox is the standalone browser, Thunderbird is the mail/news client. I should RC as I'm using it at the moment. I think it has some eccentricities over OE (probably nothing that can't be fixed with some free plugins) but some fundamental differences make it a helluva lot better to use.

Douglas

Erm, well it does it with 99% of posts, and the ones it doesn't do it to are normally from specific people (can't remember who off the top of my head), so that suggests that isn't the case, and it could be to do with the format of the message they posted.

Ah, the wrapping problems I always sort out manually - I like my posts to look vaguely neat and in order.

Peter

-- "The humble bic biro draws 13 beards, 9 devil moustaches and 49 penises on newspapers in its lifetime."