Re: How to display format=flowed (and other topics)?
* Derek Martin <invalid@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> [2005-10-13 14:37]:
> On Thu, Oct 13, 2005 at 08:06:50PM +0200, Holger Weiss wrote:
> > Sorry for being picky, but if you have a look at a newspaper, you'll
> > see that single stories are also split into multiple coloumns if
> > they are long enough. This is done exclusively for readability.
>
> Nonsense. It's done because the whole newspaper is formatted that
> way, so that they can intersperse ads in with the stories. The layout
> of printed text does not change from story to story or from page to
> page because it would look absurd, and because of historical
> limitations of the presses used to print the papers.
If you're implying newspapers would otherwise abandon coloumns and use
lines longer than 80 characters, there must be some essential difference
regarding readability criteria to all other printed material (unknown to
me).
> People's idea of what is readable differs.
While this is true whithin some limits, I disagree on your point that
readability is an entirely subjective question. You'll find both
theoretical explanation and a lot of empirical and (by looking at
printed material) practical evidence for my assertion that line lengths
of up to 80 characters are generally better readable than considerably
longer lines. Until now, my impression was that this is beyond any
serious controversy.
> > Also, as I said before, you'll hardly find _any_ book or article or
> > whatever with line lengths considerably greater than 80 characters.
>
> Mutt is not a book, a newspaper, or any other sort of printed
> material. It is a computer program.
So you're stating that while my point might be true for text printed on
paper, it is complete nonsense as soon as the same text is displayed on
a screen? While I wouldn't exclude that there are differences to print
typography, at least the studies of on-screen reading cited in this
thread suggested quite the opposite regarding line length. So I'd be
interested in how you come to this conclusion (if it's based on more
than "software is configurable" -- that's obvious).
> Your argument against implementing this hinges on entirely subjective
> measures applied to an entirely different media, and as such I find it
> to be completely inapplicable. My argument is that users want it, it's
> easy to do, impacts NO ONE negatively IN ANY WAY if it is implemented,
> and so it should be done. Is it not that simple? What possible logical
> justification can you provide for opposing the inclusion of this
> functionality from Mutt?
Please don't put words into my mouth. I explicitly stated I would _not_
mind including such an option, given it's simplicity (though, as you
know, I have no say in this matter, so that's irrelevant anyway). I
just disagreed with the _reasons_ that were given for such a change,
notably that the current Mutt behaviour would be a bug, that the broken
behaviour of other MUAs would confirm this, and that limiting lines to
less than 80 characters would be an arbitrary limit based entirely on
"personal preference" or ancient terminal limitations.
Holger
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