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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