[oclug] Line wrap lecture

[Tom Goulet]

Hi,

The point of proper line wrap is to avoid mangled viewing by users with
the standard 80 character wide display.  By "mangled" I mean when lines
are too long, or have been cruelly chopped.

A line that is too long may be abruptly wrapped by the e-mail client, so
that one or two words are on a line by itself, this is not easy to read.
A line that is too long may force the reader to scroll left and right
for every line, also highly annoying.

This is what we are trying to avoid: """
THIS is the story of an adventure that happened in Narnia and Calormen and the
lands
between, in the Golden Age when Peter was High King in Narnia and his brother
and his
two sisters were King and Queens under him.
"""

So here are some guidelines:

0) Don't let a line longer than 80 characters out of your e-mail
client, unless it is something (possibly an URL) that would break if it
were truncated.

1) When replying, fix or delete lines that have been mangled (like in
the above example).

2) New messages should start with nothing past the 72nd or 76th
(depending on your mood/attitude) or so column, so that they can be
quoted several times without going past 80 characters

And that should be more than you ever need to know about line wrap in
e-mail.  ;)

TomG