RFC 1896 (rfc1896) - Page 3 of 21

The text/enriched MIME Content-type

RFC 1896            text/enriched MIME Content-type        February 1996


   may be preceded by a solidus ("/", ASCII 47), making them negations,
   and such negations must always exist to balance the initial opening
   commands.  Thus, if the formatting command "" appears at some
   point, there must later be a "" to balance it. (NOTE: The 60
   character limit on formatting commands does NOT include the "",
   or "/" characters that might be attached to such commands.)
   Formatting commands are always case-insensitive. That is, "bold" and
   "BoLd" are equivalent in effect, if not in good taste.

Line break rules

   Line breaks (CRLF pairs in standard network representation) are
   handled specially. In particular, isolated CRLF pairs are translated
   into a single SPACE character. Sequences of N consecutive CRLF pairs,
   however, are translated into N-1 actual line breaks. This permits
   long lines of data to be represented in a natural looking manner
   despite the frequency of line-wrapping in Internet mailers. When
   preparing the data for mail transport, isolated line breaks should be
   inserted wherever necessary to keep each line shorter than 80
   characters. When preparing such data for presentation to the user,
   isolated line breaks should be replaced by a single SPACE character,
   and N consecutive CRLF pairs should be presented to the user as N-1
   line breaks.

   Thus text/enriched data that looks like this:

     This is
     a single
     line

     This is the
     next line.


     This is the
     next section.

   should be displayed by a text/enriched interpreter as follows:

     This is a single line
     This is the next line.

     This is the next section.

   The formatting commands, not all of which will be implemented by all
   implementations, are described in the following sections.





Resnick & Walker             Informational