[From Bill Powers (970518.1820 MDT)]
Having just received yet another post alternating between full lines
and lines with one or two words on them, I am pleading for some clever
person to figure out how to handle the margin problem. People who use
margins of 80 characters can't expect their posts to come through looking
right on a screen with margins set at 79 characters or less. I'm using
Eudora, which hides about 3 columns behind a scroll bar, so I can't receive
anything correctly with more than about 77 characters per line.
This problem is compounded when citations are quoted by adding the ">"
sign at the start of each line, and ">>" for quoting a quote, and so on. The
original text, even if it starts out at 77 characters per line, becomes 78
per line when quoted, 79 when quoted again, etc..
The only way to be sure of originating text with fewer characters per line
in Eudora is to shrink the window horizontally. I just did that, and had to
go back and fix about six lines in this post. Of course if I tried to _read_
mail on this size screen, the lines of most posts would overlap again, going
long-short-long-short...
I think the only solution is for everybody to set their margins to that
there are only about 65 characters per line -- a reasonable number, I think.
Then you can quote and re-quote and re-re-quote without running over the
edge of the receipient's screen. You might have to widen the margins
slightly to accommodate the ">" signs when you quote, but we hardly ever
encounter more than ">>>" at the start of a line.
That's my solution -- I hope somebody can come up with a better one.
Best,
Bill P.