On Wed, 2003-04-30 at 10:28, Colin Watson wrote: > On Wed, Apr 30, 2003 at 03:45:15AM -0700, Paul Johnson wrote: > > On Wed, Apr 30, 2003 at 09:47:16AM +0200, Francois Chenais wrote: > > > | Please turn your line wraps on to 72 columns. > > > > > > Why 72, the default in my Sylpheed-Claws is 75. > > > > 72 is about the longest you can go and still be both readable and > > quotable. > > Anything up to 76 is fine in my book. Beyond two levels of quoting I > always either trim or reformat anyway. > > Cheers, > > -- > Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk] Stretching the analogies back to historic methods, if you took "typing" classes in school (rather than today's "keyboarding" classes,) you learned about 10 characters per inch on the typical typewriter (an ancient mechanical or electro-mechanical device for applying characters in real time to legacy paper) and that typical line lengths were five or six inches, depending on the length of the document. That would mean 50 or 60 characters a line. There were "Elite" typewriters designed to 12 characters per inch, and with six inch lines, that was 72 character lines. Because that could be divided into quarters of an inch for tab placements (back before inches became obsolete in most of the world,) it was useful in preparing and presenting long documents with organised structures such as tables. -- Mark L. Kahnt, FLMI/M, ALHC, HIA, AIAA, ACS, MHP ML Kahnt New Markets Consulting Tel: (613) 531-8684 / (613) 539-0935 Email: kahnt@hosehead.dyndns.org
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