[sf-lug] writing styles/improvements on code examples, etc.

[jim]

     When writing email responses to a MailMan group list,
keep lines of text below about 70 characters.

     I copied one line of text from the sf-lug archive.
     The line is within the " characters. The entirety
looks good in my editor. My guess is that many of you
will see an apparent line wrap at around the comma
after the word like.


     The command(s) below show that the seeming wrap point
is at the 74th character (or so).

$ echo "  E.g. (I won't do or outline a whole flow chart or the like, 
I'll leave " | wc
       1      15      74

Note that
1. I used browser to see the sf-lug archive email message
2. I used the copy function in the browsers menu system
    to copy the single line.
3. I brought up a terminal window and typed in echo "
4. I used the paste function in the terminal windows menus
5. After the copied line appeared I typed " | wc and then
    hit the  <ENTER>  key.
6. the  echo  command sent its output to the  wc  program
    which reported that it got 1 line and 15 words and 74
    characters.


     One trick I've used is to put the following string
in my ASCII text files

012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789

     The above is sixty characters (six sets of 0123456789).




On 02/10/2016 06:32 PM, jim wrote:
>
> More and more thanks, Michael. Point taken.
>
>
> On 02/10/2016 06:15 PM, Michael Paoli wrote:
>> Yep, we can all learn.
>> I'm (too?) commonly "guilty[1]" of omitting better/sufficient
>> white space (e.g. notably empty lines) for better readability.
>> Good published books on code/examples, might also be helpful
>> too most all as general guide/hints/suggestions (though
>> doesn't necessarily work quite the same way in, e.g.
>> email - and also where many clients may just be looking
>> at straight plain ASCII (or similar) text, and not HTML
>> or the like).
>>
>> 1. probably among other writing offenses.
>>
>>> From: "Asheesh Laroia" <asheesh at sandstorm.io>
>>> Subject: Re: [sf-lug] ANALYSYS--EXPLANATION Re: request for help re 
>>> ssh -- sshd login failure
>>> Date: Wed, 10 Feb 2016 00:36:15 -0800
>>
>>> I have experienced the same difficulty reading these replies from 
>>> Jim and
>>> also was concerned about creating offense. Jim, I hope that you can 
>>> make
>>> your replies more readable! Until then I will continue to attempt to 
>>> read
>>> them, but it's rather difficult. You can get a sense of how 
>>> difficult by
>>> looking at the archived mail:
>>> http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/sf-lug/2016q1/011676.html
>>>
>>> On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 12:18 AM, Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> 
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Quoting Jim Stockford (jim at well.com):
>>>>
>>>> > I try to explain each command in my comments, interspersed below.
>>>>
>>>> I appreciate the effort you go do, in constructing that interspersion:
>>>> I'm guesssing you are doing that entirely manually, which implies a
>>>> semi-heroic editing effort.
>>>>
>>>> I see you use Mozilla Thunderbird.  Back when I used Thunderbird for
>>>> corporate mail, I found that it did decent quoting automatically but
>>>> that its internal text editor was lacking.  I used a Thunderbrd
>>>> extension that permitted use of any arbitrary external editor, and 
>>>> then
>>>> just used vim as that editor.  These days, there is an all-in-one
>>>> solution called Muttator, which you can find here:
>>>> http://www.vimperator.org/muttator
>>>>
>>>> FWIW, though I greatly appreciate the work you put into manual
>>>> construction of replies, please consider using automated tools such as
>>>> Muttator, which would probably greately reduce the amount of work for
>>>> you _and_ render your repsonse messages more legible.  Alas, I find 
>>>> that
>>>> the lack of line breaks in your replies and your extremely unclear and
>>>> eccentric style of quoting to be very difficult to parse at all, Jim.
>>>>
>>>> I certainly didn't want to create offencce, and so haven't been saying
>>>> anything about this, but IMO it's a significant deterrent against even
>>>> trying to parse your replies.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> sf-lug mailing list
>>>> sf-lug at linuxmafia.com
>>>> http://linuxmafia.com/mailman/listinfo/sf-lug
>>>> Information about SF-LUG is at http://www.sf-lug.org/
>>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> sf-lug mailing list
>> sf-lug at linuxmafia.com
>> http://linuxmafia.com/mailman/listinfo/sf-lug
>> Information about SF-LUG is at http://www.sf-lug.org/
>>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> sf-lug mailing list
> sf-lug at linuxmafia.com
> http://linuxmafia.com/mailman/listinfo/sf-lug
> Information about SF-LUG is at http://www.sf-lug.org/

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/sf-lug/attachments/20160210/e07a8eb5/attachment.html>