Re: unwrapa invisible?

[Robert Holmgren holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to message from "Myron Gochnauer"  on Sat, 11 May 2002
08:41:11 -0300


> I use the "unwrapa" routine ("un-wrap all") in XYWWWEB.U2 (v.105) fairly
> frequently. Is there a good reason why it works "on-screen" rather than
> invisibly. While it's rather heartening to watch something working, it does
> slow things down a great deal.

Unwrap[a] is a tad slow, not so much because it omits to freeze the display,
but because it is *thinking* -- evaluating each carriage return to determine
what kind of  it is, and what the context is. It differentiates 13/10
combos from lone 13s and soft carriage returns according to (your
user-specified) VA DE1 variable; it only unwraps carriage returns that occur
after text, leaving contiguous s alone. It does intelligent spacing,
replacing a  with one space if it follows an alphanumeric, and two spaces if
it follows an appropriate punctuation mark like a period or question mark.
Originally I wrote it to unwrap one line at a time; unwrapA (unwrap from current
CursorPos to EOF) was an afterthought -- just keep looping back until there's
nothing left.

There's a companion frame, rewrap[a], which works similarly. You can set the
PW or RM or IP value to establish the line length you want, then just rewrap.
For composing Emails (e.g. managed by XyShell SENDMAIL and GETMAIL), you can
toggle into expanded mode, which limits your line length to around 75 (78 max),
more or less appropriate for most mail clients, then rewrapA from TOF (although
its just amazing how many people make no effort to widen their mailer's window
to accommodate longer lines, so I'm constantly seeing my own msgs, quoted back
to me, with line after line wrapping a single trailing word on a line by itself
-- distracting to read and looks like complete ****. Alternatively, there's a
nice MAILPREP frame in the next U2 which takes a command line arg for line
length, e.g. "MAILPREP 60" -- but that's another story. (I just
resurfaced from 5 weeks of farm work, so I'm gonna get the next U2 out the door
-- promise!)

Anyway, I'll be happy to make unwrap invisible, but that has a real downside,
namely that with a large file, user begins to wonder whether XyWrite has gone to
sleep, or frozen, or what; and with a short file, a couple of pages, the deed is
done in under a second, so who cares. To unwrap a 308K file with lots of s
takes 42 secs visible, and 23 secs invisible, on a slow machine (266KHz; on a
1.7MHz it takes 6 secs visible). But how often are you gonna unwrap a 300K
file?? I rather like watching it progress through the file... (I use it a LOT,
mostly short stuff), but I don't really care. Lemme know your preference.

Ciao

-----------------------------
Robert Holmgren
holmgren@xxxxxxxx
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