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Re: How to display format=flowed?



* Thomas Zehetbauer <thomasz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> [2005-10-13 17:52]:
> On 2005-10-12 | 17:04:12, Holger Weiss wrote:
> >So?  Newspapers could of course easily widen their columns to whatever
> >number of characters they see fit, but they keep the number small for
> >a good reason.  BTW, we're not only talking about newspapers; you'll
> >hardly find _any_ printed material with a line length significantly
> >greater than 80 characters (apart from badly typeset MS Word stuff or
> >the like).  This has nothing to do with 80x25 terminal limitations.
>
> You completely ignore that I have pointed out some important differences
> between newspapers and terminals:
>
> Newspapers are seldom held exactly horizontal. Longer lines mean more 
> (unwanted) vertical eye movement.

In any case, longer lines will increase horizontal eye movement much
more than vertical eye movement.  You seem to state that readability is
affected by vertical eye movement only, which is wrong.

> Newspapers use hyphenation

I don't get it.  Are you stating that hyphenation would be needed for 80
character lines?

> and more than one column.

Yes, in order to get shorter lines.  Again, I don't get how this
strengthens your point, sorry.

> Imagine a paper that uses only one column and leaves ~70% of the page
> empty. That is what mutt does with the terminal!

Only if your terminal is ~260(!) characters wide.  Why would you want to
have such a wide terminal for Mutt?

Holger

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