[PLUG] Line lengths for emails

[Rich Shepard]

On Wed, 7 Jan 2015, Keith Lofstrom wrote:

> I tend to write my emails and other documents with a target line length
> approaching but less than 68 characters

Keith,

   So we've noticed. :-)

> So, what do you folks find easiest to read, and what is your tolerance
> range? I expect some will respond like "all lines MUST be exactly 72
> characters, use a thesaurus to find words with the correct spacing" or "my
> enter key is broken so it is all one line." Such responses will be
> weighted appropriately.

   My MUA is alpine running in an xterm and using Joe's Own Editor (joe). The
line length is set to 78 characters. The virtual terminal window geometry is
130x40 characters. This helps with all the html-formatted mail that is the
norm with Microserfs and those using GUI mail writers.

   There's something about Windows' mail tools that cause each paragraph to
be a single line, and so many of these messages have 2 or 3 lines between
paragraphs. I suppost the spacing is ancient memory of using typrewriters.
Alpine does a nice job of presenting these missives in a text-readable
format. When I respond to one, I reformat the long line of each paragraph to
a maximum line length of 78 chars (using the joe shortcut of ^k-j).

   This has been my standard for almost 2 decades now and no one's complained
about it. This message is formatted to that line length so see how it
appears to you.

Regards,

Rich