[gopher] Re: Width of text files

[Ralph Furmaniak <sugaku@sympatico.ca>]

> I am a boy from Italy, 18 in a month or so, and I'm interested in all 
> the technologies that have been "forgotten", just like Gopher. Too bad I 
> didn't live the first Gopher era, but I was a bit too young... :)

I don't usually say this, but I'm 16 <g>

> The question is: how wide should I make the text files available via 
> gopher? 80 columns?

Some people mentioned that 80 will work, but I found that since the client might put in spaces and other stuff that it should be a smaller number.  I setup Bucktooth to wrap to 65, mostly because this is the optimal line length in typesetting (easiest to read).  It only wraps info lines, so as to keep it from wrapping perl scripts like it used to.  For creating files you can use an editor that automagically wraps the lines or you can use barebones HTML (ie h1 h2, title, ...).  Unlike others I find no problem putting in a bit of HTML on my gopher (even though I have not done this yet) as long as it is more text than hyper.  I would myself probably use a LaTeX document converted into HTML.