Juan Pedro Bolivar Puente
I am going a bit off-topic here...
Me too, but that's how mailing lists work. =)
And what is the universally best length of line anyway? I have also seen people sending emails with really thin columns that get annoying to read... If you feel bad about emails sent with long lines, just enable text wrapping in your email reader.
The big problem is that some mail/news readers assume that lines are prebroken, especially when it comes to older terminal-based readers. This is bad, but it's the state of things. Otherwise there is little reason to prebreak lines and many reasons not to do it. To answer your question, typographically you should prefer lines with no more and no less than 80-90 characters. Longer lines tend to distract the reader when it comes to find the beginning of the next line. Shorter lines are annoying to read, because you need too much reorientation. That's why all HTML pages I write contain something like the following CSS statement: div#content { max-width: 80ex; } I think mail/news readers like Thunderbird go into the right direction by employing an additional header, which precisely specifies the line breaking behaviour used in the mail. The actual text is prewrapped, but using the header newer readers can reconstruct the paragraphs and display them the way the user wishes. In fact I would love if HTML mails would be more accepted in the open source community. After all there is nothing bad about HTML and it would solve the above problem. Most reasonings against it are related to compatibility or interoperability, which is no problem, because you can always add a text/plain part. Greets, Ertugrul -- nightmare = unsafePerformIO (getWrongWife >>= sex) http://blog.ertes.de/