I'm still working on ANZI, a dos text presentation toolset that splits the text mode screen into two 39 character columns. Should work on any pc with a VGA. Makes an ascii text look like the facing pages of a book. gonzo easier to read than text which runs all the way across the screen.
Recently found EMODE.COM, which can do 50lines x 94 columns, which should work on any svga vesa. with two columns in the center to separate, it gives 46 char text columns. Seems to be as readable as the conventional 80 col screen, but has just about the same content as the facing pages of a real book. Because it works with plain ascii, after being reformatted with the correct right margin (done with any text editor) a 200,000 word novel would fit on a floppy. Makes just about any old pc useful as an ebook display tool. It uses color like ANSI, but in a consistent way. In conversation, all female voices are reds, all male voices blues. Lots easier to see which character says what, just as we can tell hearing the timbre of voices. By changing both the foreground and the *background* color, there's a couple dozen different combinations so that each character in a given novel can have his own set. Changing the background color of a font without changing the background of the whole page is a bitch in html. Having a particular color code for each character makes it easy for an author to string search for every word any given character says, to check for continuity or whatever.
