Formatting output (was: Order by and timestamp)

On 2020-03-15 16:48:35 -0500, Steven Lembark wrote:
> On Sun, 15 Mar 2020 22:33:35 +0100:wq
> Björn Lundin <b(dot)f(dot)lundin(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>
> > And to my surprise i get a result like this (note the order of
> > column STARTTS)
>
> (1) Suggest using "pastebin.com" for this kind of data. It may not
> look very pretty -- or readable at all -- on the viewer's end
> depending on their settings (see below for example).
[...]
> > marketid | marketname | startts |
> > eventid ….
> > ….
> >
> > 1.127253880 | To Be Placed | 2016-09-29 16:10:00 |
> > 27951325 | 1.127275624 | 1m4f Hcap | 2016-09-30
> > 16:20:00 | 27953169 | 1.127275625 | To Be Placed |

This is weird. The output is correctly formatted in the text/plain part
and the HTML part looks reasonable, too: Every line is in a div of its
own, so it shouldn't be jumbled together like that (Out of curiosity:
What mail program did use to read this?). The only obvious problem I see
is the use of the "Menlo" font. Non-Mac Users won't have that and won't
know that they should substitute a monospace font, so the alignment will
be off.

As far as pasted output on this list goes, Björn's message looked
actually quite good.

Some problems I see frequently and find annoying:

* Wide output (especially explain plans) with wrapped lines. I find
these almost impossible to read, so I have to save the mail to a file
and manually undo the line breaks to read it. I rarely bother to do
that.

* ASCII graphics which only line up in a certain proportional font

* text/plain messages with very long lines which really should be
paragraphs.

hp

--
_ | Peter J. Holzer | Story must make more sense than reality.
|_|_) | |
| | | hjp(at)hjp(dot)at | -- Charles Stross, "Creative writing
__/ | http://www.hjp.at/ | challenge!"