[PLUG] Line lengths for emails

[Paul Heinlein]

On Wed, 7 Jan 2015, Rich Shepard wrote:

> 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
>
>> 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.

I also use alpine, but with the built-in (pico) editor set to wrap 
at 70 columns.

> When I respond [...], I reformat the long line of each paragraph to 
> a maximum line length of 78 chars (using the joe shortcut of ^k-j).

My alpine is compiled with Eduardo Chappa's multi-level-quote patch 
that gracefully handles replying to threads where multiple people are 
quoted:

   http://patches.freeiz.com/alpine/

A simple Ctrl-J almost always correctly reformats even the gnarliest 
paragraph.

alpine also composes with and honors the "format=flowed" text 
content-type defined way back in RFC 2646 so that, say, paragraphs 
composed in my terminal will wrap smoothly in your client even if your 
client has a different column width than mine.

-- 
Paul Heinlein
heinlein at madboa.com
45°38' N, 122°6' W