Re: Linewrap and more!

Pete Casso (pet...@aol.com) wrote --

> Considering that some of the other clients also start linewrapping at 75
> characters, I would stay away with a margin of a couple of characters, in
> my previous post I suggested 72 characters as a safe width.

Whatever the case, people *must* wrap text messages before 80 characters
and *should* wrap them before 74 characters. Eighty-column text-only
displays are still very common.

The statement "clients... [he means mail and news programs, folks] start
linewrapping at 75 characters" is strange. Admittedly, I don't know
what's out there; all I have for Internet stuff are Unix programs. All
the programs I've seen let me select any editor I want to handle text,
and I can't imagine an editor that wraps received messages or that won't
let me set the maximum number of characters per line in outgoing
messages. Are you saying that some programs wrap *received* material, or
that some have a fixed maximum width? Any such program, IMO, is garbage.

Not that I would dispute a recommendation to keep material to 72 columns.
When required, though -- especially for ASCII art -- I say "take it to
the limit": 79 columns if necessary (but sign your work so "> " quoting
is unnecessary; who wants "> " on every line of their work?), or more if
really, really required -- but INCLUDE A WARNING and EXPLAIN YOUR
REASONS.

I ordinarily *detest* anything that goes to 80 characters or more per
line. But I have one ASCII-art file that goes to 126 characters. The
artist provides a warning and an explanation at the beginning; because of
this, and because of the quality of the art, I would not complain if he
had made it even wider than that.

Dan Strychalski
dsk...@cameonet.cameo.com.tw

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