Google services mangle, split many diagrams (8, 3, 4, 4)

It's actually not a good clue at all, but I was bored.

The real problem I discovered is with Google news, on my ASCII diagram
from yesterday, in the thread "apparent image size." It looked fine on
my all-text reader (fixed width font), and it looks OK in the article
in which I requoted my own diagram. In the original post, however, the
Google archive has torn apart and redistributed the characters of my
ASCII diagram. It's done this a number of times in the past, and I
wonder if anyone knows why that happens.

Brian Tung
The Astronomy Corner at http://astro.isi.edu/
Unofficial C5+ Home Page at http://astro.isi.edu/c5plus/
The PleiadAtlas Home Page at http://astro.isi.edu/pleiadatlas/
My Own Personal FAQ (SAA) at http://astro.isi.edu/reference/faq.txt

Brian Tung wrote:

the Google archive has torn apart and redistributed the characters of
my ASCII diagram. It's done this a number of times in the past, and I
wonder if anyone knows why that happens.

It's a side effect of Google's attempt to clean up the formatting of
quoted text. The initial vertical bars (|) are being interpreted as
quote marks. Note that your ASCII diagram is colored the same maroon
as the quoted text to which you responded.

The clean-up fixes text in which the line breaks no longer correspond to
those of the original post. Think of posts in which quote marks are in
the middle of the lines, because of variations in the line lengths of
different editors.

It's not as egregious as the damage done to Yahoo group posts. Those
are always displayed as HTML text, which means that extra spaces in the
original post are removed. ASCII diagrams collapse against the left
margin, and program source code loses all of its formatting.

- Ernie http://mywebpages.comcast.net/erniew