Quoting and deleting // was Rules

Roger Mills wrote:

> Perhaps the problem is that in some email programs (mine for instance),
> if you hit "Reply" to a digest msg., the entire digest is copied. (AOL
> did not do this, when I was using it last winter)  Lots of tiresome
> deleting.
Tiresome deleting ... ha!

I read on Egroups and then post through Brown. To do this I must:

1) Copy the text from the egroups page and paste it into a new mail
   message.

2) Because of, I guess, the way that the egroups page is layed out, this
   generates _massive_ left hand margins. Now, Notepad used to be
   available on these computers, and that was great because to get rid of
   those margins I could first of all paste into Notepad and then run
   search-and-replace to recursively replace all double-spaces with
   single-spaces. However, the _only_ programs accessible on these
   computers now are Netscape and Telnet (and Pine through Telnet), so I
   can't do that.

3) Therefore I have to delete the margins manually. Unfortunately,
   as Pine resides on a Unix server, the <del> key doesn't do what it's
   bl%dy well supposed to do - it behaves as though it were <backspace>
   (stupid, stupid). And because you can't use the mouse interactively
   with Telnet/Pine (except for copying text), I can't highlight the
   margin and select 'cut' or anything sensible like that. No, the _only_
   I can delete the margins is to go backspace, backspace, backspace
   (repeat n times), down arrow, right, right, right (repeat n),
   backspace, backspace, backspace, ..., down, right, right, right, ...,
   and so on. It's a bl%dy nuisance and I have to do it _every_ time I
   post!

4) Of course, since I copy/paste the message from egroups I also have to
   add the quote marks in manually. Angled bracket, space, down, left,
   left, angled bracket, space, down, left, left, angled bracket, sp ...
   It's even more laborious than _that_, because I do an extra
   <space>-<backspace> on each line to check that the text doesn't
   dribble too close to the right margin.

5) The only saving grace is the delete-a-whole-line feature in Unix
   programs, which is Crtl-K. This is useful for snipping.

*

End of rant.

*

Appendix: Sample of raw text copied in from egroups:
---------------------------------------------------

              probably possible to tell the program not to do that, but I
find it's
              simpler to select, copy and paste the desired text into a
"new message".  Or
              perhaps it's a Yahoo thing.    Or, tell Conlang to send you
individual
              emails, not digest.  Today, there were only 100 or
so....:-[

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