(no subject)

[plonq]

Today's "Ask Plonq" segment is brought to you courtesy of a co-worker who has been using computers for the better part of 30 years.

Dear Plonq,

Can you help me out here?  Every time I start a new line, Outlook insists on capitalizing the first word.

Dear Outlook User,

You need to disable auto-correct in your program settings.... wait a minute, are you hitting a carriage return in the middle of your sentences?

Yes, because I don't want my sentences to go all the way to the edge of the screen.

You do realize that if the person at the other end of this correspondence is running at a resolution lower than you are, the auto-wrap is going to butcher this message.

... What is this "auto-wrap" of which you speak?

facepalm
headdesk
hairpullout
bleah

Comments

[anthony-lion.livejournal.com]

You know, I think we have a couple of users like that at my office, too...

[mwalimu.livejournal.com]

The text editor I worked with for a long time put hard line breaks at the end of every line. If I needed to rework a paragraph, such as changing the order of sentences, the process for doing it was quite cumbersome (at least it seems that way now; I didn't think much about it at the time). It wasn't until about 1999 that I began using editors that supported free-flowing text.

Even now it's not unusual to see younglings choosing their fonts and layout oh so carefully to make a document look just right, unaware that it will probably look different when rendered on another user's computer with a different setup. (Remember back in the TLK heyday when someone would post a webpage that only looked right when viewed with IE, and if you complained that it didn't work under Netscape, their only response was to tell you to switch to IE?)

[anthony-lion.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, there's a lot of those sites around still...

If it's a netshop I find another that sells the same type of goods and shop there, then email the people who runs the first shop and tell them how much I bought from the competition...

Me? A bastard?

Oh yeah!

BTW: What kind of stoneage system were you working on?
Not even the text editor on the ND(Sintran) systems were that cumbersome.

[mwalimu.livejournal.com]

It was an IBM editor that was one of the best of its kind when I started using it (circa 1986), though I stuck with it long after better ones came along. It was for working with plain ascii text, and many of its features were geared more toward writing code than writing text. In the later years I was mostly using it on a 386 computer that had Windows 3.1; I ran most apps (including this editor) from DOS in those days; I only started Windows when I needed to run a Windows application.

[typographer.livejournal.com]

And not so younglings. I will not name names, but certain forms I had to download this last year from a fabulous convention had been laid out that way. And they became horrid messes when opened at my end.

[furahi.livejournal.com]

Not just that, but mail servers may break lines longer that a certain length, say it's 80 characters.
If this person was breaking them at 85 characters and the mail went through one of those servers the person receiving would see lines of 80 and 5 alternatedly =P

That's why UU encoding ignores line breakes and spaces