On Sun, Feb 02, 2003 at 02:01:03AM -0600, Jordan Bettis wrote:
> > Ever noticed how many characters there are on a line of a newspaper or
> > in books? It may nog be exactly 80, but it's close. The reason is much
> > longer lines are harder to read. Try putting some tekst on a page in
> > landscape; it's really annoying.
>
> Actually, it's closer to 60 characters. That's why LaTeX wraps at
> about 60 characters by default. Typesetters decided a long time ago
> that lines shouldn't be longer than that.
I think that number (60) does not include punctuation nor whitespace. A
space wasn't a character in traditional typesetting, was it?
> Having a limit to the number of characters per line is very important,
> unfortunately 72 is a bit too wide.
When you wrap lines at 72 columns, you get about 60 letters in a line.
> On the subject of wrapping lines, of course modern mail readers can
> wrap long
> lines. Hell, my TERMINAL can wrap long lines so I don't lose data
> off the
> edge, but that still means things end up looking like crap when it
> finally
> reaches the newline and it's not aligned with edge of the terminal.
Yep, wrapping lines at something wider than 80 columns is a crime.
Either wrap them properly, or not wrap them at all. BTW there's a
convention of specifying Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed if you
do that. I think there's an RFC for that, but I don't remember the
details.
Regards,
Marius Gedminas
--
Give a man a computer program and you give him a headache,
but teach him to program computers and you give him the power
to create headaches for others for the rest of his life...
R. B. Forest
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