Re: wrapping [was: Re: disable paragraph flows in mozilla?]
Lo, on Saturday, May 18, Hans Ekbrand did write:
> On Fri, May 17, 2002 at 03:40:47PM -0700, Vineet Kumar wrote:
> > The reason most people suggest 72 is that traditionally, terminals
> > are 80 characters wide, and 72 leaves enough room to be quoted with
> > "> " four times.
That's one of the reasons I like VM and Gnus. They run in (X)Emacs, and
fill-paragraph-or-region (M-q) is almost always smart enough to get the
quoting brackets right when it refills a paragraph.
> Although I actually have a terminal (can't say I use it much though),
> I sometimes wonder if email conventions should be derived from
> limitations of such ancient hardware. In some sense, its a good
> practice to require as little as possible from the clients, but is
> 80x25 a limit that anyone is facing anymore?
Yes. My primary computer is in the shop, so I'm reduced to reading mail
on my firewall. As it's a firewall with limited disk space and so
forth, I don't have X installed. Thus, 80x25.
Plus, if I'm in a hurry, or over a slow network connection, I like to be
able to read my mail with /usr/bin/less. The preponderance of
quoted-printable and base-64 and HTML, never mind long lines, makes this
difficult---IMO, for no real gain. (Binary attachments are another
story, obviously.)
> So, a better argument for wrapping lines at 72 chars would perhaps be
> that it make the text easier to read (even if you have real screen
> estate that could handle a lot more).
True; it's long been understood in the professional typesetting
community that lines which are too long are difficult to read. I've
even seen discussions of what `too long' means---I think it's a function
of how long the font's em-space is, but I don't remember the details off
the top of my head.
(Add this to the fact that most on-screen computer fonts, IMO, don't
have enough leading, and you've got serious legibility problems.)
Richard
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org
Reply to: