You explain that your FAQ is appearing with long lines broken at the 70th
column with "=3D" at the end of a line indicating continuation. You also
explain that "=3D=3D=3D" is being replaced by "=3D3D=3D3D=3D3D"
The =3D signs come from MIME encoding, a standard that allows ISO 8859-1
(Latin 1) characters -- such as characters with accents -- to traverse
7-bit Internet news and mail circuits. MIME also specifies treatment of
files having long lines. MIME additionally allows attached files, but that
seems irrelevant to your problem. When a MIME encoder sees a character with
an accent, it codes =3D followed by two ASCII-coded hex digits. This means
that =3D seen in the input must be so coded. This explains the =3D3D.
MIME isn't a bug, it's a feature. It permits automatic packing and
unpacking of attached files, and it allows me to use the correct spelling
for the names of my colleagues Ren=E9 Villeneuve and Tapio Saram=E4ki. The b=
ug
is that MIME is coding is being applied to your document. If this started
recently, some segment of the path traversed by your article has begun to
be MIME encoded. You'll have to find out where. A proper MIME encoder
inserts a few header lines such as
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=3D"us-ascii"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT
Content-Length: 1232
These headers inform downstream software of the encoding. In fact I pulled
this example from your own e-mail message to faq-maintainers; evidently you
posted that from a MIME mailer. Your FAQ shows no evidence of these
headers; if they were once there I don't know who removed them.
> This problem appears to be a function of the length of my FAQ ... 80 KB ..=
.
It's conceivable that some piece of software -- quite possibly your own
e-mail application -- has decided to MIME-encode only long messages. But
this behaviour would be unusual and nonstandard.
Did you recently change your e-mail application?
C.
Charles A. Poynton
Poynton@inforamp.net [Mac Eudora/MIME/BinHex]
<http://www.inforamp.net/~poynton/>
tel: +1 416 486 3271
fax: +1 416 486 3657
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