Subj : COMADORE
To : HusTler
From : Codefenix
Date : Fri Dec 09 2022 11:05 am
Re: COMADORE
By: HusTler to theviper on Mon Dec 05 2022 09:24 pm
Hu> You have a 30/70 chance your ansi will display correctly. It depends what
Hu> method (software) you use and which BBS's you post it on. Making an ASCII
Hu> ad like MRO suggested would be the best thing.
The thing that I've found that works best is saving the finished ANSI so it has a maximum length of 79 or fewer characters per line. I'm referring to the line length internally within the file, and not the visual row width you see when you view it in the editor. There's a difference.
Any lines longer than 79 characters get line-wrapped by some BBS message readers, which is why they end up looking garbled. Look at (but don't edit) one of the SDT files in your /sbbs/data/subs for your networked ad echoes sometime, and you'll see that the ads that originate from Mystic BBSes almost never have a line length longer than 79 for this reason. The built-in Mystic ANSI editor offers this option by default, and so does AcidDraw. I personally use AcidDraw to do one final save when I prepare something as an ad.
All of the different message readers for Sync (DDMessageReader, msglist, and stock) seem to have only just recently solved for this problem earlier this year, so now they display ANSI pretty much however it's posted. But older Sync boards still using the older readers won't be able to display them unless they're saved properly.
Hu> Also keep in mind many BBS users turn off ansi displays.
Very true. This is why I also include non-ANSI ads in my rotation on other nets where I suspect older readers are dominant.
