Matthew Kleiman wrote,
| At the same time, I hate to see subscriber's messages get bounced,
| especially novices, to whom the 80 character limitation may seem
| arbitrary and make little sense given modern email clients.
You can always reprogram your robomoderator to divert posts for your atten-
tion, rather than rejecting them, if their only violation is being too wide.
One thing to keep in mind is that expecting the recipient to handle word wrap
makes it impossible to send tabular or columnar data: the recipient has to
accept the sender's formatting, and the sender has to be responsible for
formatting the body correctly.
| So, without a clear rule to guide me, I'm curious whether other list
| managers have a rule/policy on long lines and why.
Since I have only one remaining list and I moderate it, my list's receipt
for submissions adds another paragraph if the post is too wide, explaining
that it will take a little extra time, since even if everything else in the
post is just fine, the moderator will still have to edit it to fix the text
width. Usually posters who receive it don't comment; some have apologized.
None, so far, have responded unkindly.
I used to have procmail filter them through fmt, but the versions of fmt to
which I had access and my skill with their options were not enough to keep
it from making the text less legible than it started out, so now I load them
into vi and apply fmt by hand or rearrange a few line lengths here and there
to get them within seventy-nine columns.
Some of my members have mail clients or editors that will dutifully keep
their new text narrow, but their cited text from earlier posts is sacrosanct,
and if it was seventy-eight columns or wider, adding a two-column citation
(such as "> ") will make it eighty columns wide and trigger my "too wide"
addendum to the receipt. Those whose editors or mailers act that way get
used to the notification when they post follow-ups to others' articles.
BTW, your claim that the screen width originated with punch cards gave me a
laugh: have you never heard of paper or typewriters? Eighty pica-sized cha-
racters and two quarter-inch margins just fill the width of 8.5" stationery.
