G. Branden Robinson dixit: >> flavour of) unreadability. The traditional thing is to break >> somewhere shortly before 80 characters - not arbitrary, but chosen to >> fit traditional terminal sizes and, more recently, default window >> sizes.
Yes, please do so. There actually are standards for (plaintext) eMail. You are to wrap your lines so that, with few exceptions (such as very long URLs or other strings unwise to wrap, so, not “body text”), no line is wider than 72 halfwidth columns. This gives ample space for a few rounds of quoting before it hits 80, in which case I tend to just let jupp (my editor) reformat the quoted lines. Signatures have sigdashes, a line comprised of exactly “-- ”, followed by four lines of up to 78 columns as they aren’t quoted regularly. (The four-line limit is not as rigorously enforced; I have a couple of signatures on file that are a bit longer, but it is still a good guideline.) >> > This arises from using a 5x8px bitmap font on a 1280x800px display. >> 6x13 and 1920x1080 in my case. But I don't usually use windows >> spanning the full width of the display. I don’t use one spanning the full width for lynxing fanfiction, to get back closer to the mailing list topic; I found that, with the default margins, 90 halfwidth cells wide is a good size. I recently had to acquire a new laptop for $dayjob, and it has a whopping 2560×1600 px. I just scaled my bitmap font up, so instead of 9×18 I now use an 18×36 font. There are limits to what people can read; some people in my circles require even larger fonts. There’s also a limit to what people can comprehend. My Thinkpad X40 and X61 has a natural upper limit of 113 character cells; the new work laptop can do 142. I find that if something happens in the far right of the screen, I just cannot notice it, so I still keep my xterms at 113 cells on the work laptop. (Or smaller, as above.) This means that, yes, do wrap your lines, or you’ll find it isn’t accessible to those you’re seeking correspondence with. (I personally dislike format=flawed, but some use it.) bye, //mirabilos -- 22:59⎜<Vutral> glaub ich termkit is kompliziert | glabe nicht das man damit schneller arbeitet | reizüberflutung │ wie windows │ alles evil zuviel bilder │ wie ein spiel | 23:00⎜<Vutral> die meisten raffen auch nicht mehr von windows | 23:01⎜<Vutral> bilderbücher sind ja auch nich wirklich verbreitet als erwachsenen literatur ‣ who needs GUIs thus?
