Hi, Ivan!  Recently you wrote in a message to Roy Witt:


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>>>>> Ivan Shmakov wrote to Roy Witt:

 IS> [1] http://www.amazon.com/Denon-AKDL1-Dedicated-L...

 IS> [2] news:mailto:0001HW.CDB00E4C03038059B01029BF@news.e...

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           Looks okay, from where I sit....  :-)



IS>  My OP contained two URIs -- a 68 characters long http: one,
IS>  and a 63 characters long news: one.  Neither should've been
IS>  split, even after an "overhead" of 9 characters (reference
IS>  labels and quote attribution) was added (thus resulting in
IS>  77 characters on a line at most.)

IS>  Or is there a chance for a line to be split, or mangled, by
IS>  the software even if less than 80 (79) characters long these
IS>  days?


           In a word... yes.  I know two or three Fidonetters, for example, who
 set their margins at 40 characters per line.  One is visually impaired & uses
a screen reader which imposes this limit.  The other(s) may also have
limitations imposed by their hardware and/or software for reasons I'm unaware
of.  However, I can offer an educated guess as to what's going on.

           Over the years I've observed SysOps & BBS users struggling to get by
 on very low incomes because of medical conditions which make it difficult...
if not impossible... to find steady employment.  Such people often depend on
other people's castoffs, which may seem quite beyond the pale to younger folks
and/or to the fashionable crowd.  Dallas tells me the instruction manual for
the Atari 130XE, which ceased production in 1987, is still available.  To the
best of our knowledge there was no mailer for it.  But my point is that it also
 limited the display to 40 characters per line & other stuff of a similar
vintage may behave the same way.  Retirees with pensions based on how much $$$
they earned in pre- inflation days are another group who could be making do
with antique equipment.

           And then... as Roy has just reminded me... some people prefer to set
 their margins at 72-78 characters although they could use 80 if they wanted
to.


                                  ...


           When I want an example to stand out, or quote something like:

                  Be not the first by which the new are tried,
                  Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.
                                            -- Alexander Pope

I know timEd won't attempt to improve on this citation because in effect I have
 indicated, by indenting it, that I don't want overcorrections made to my
choice of spacing.  IMHO software exists to serve my needs... not vice versa. 
But one has to know how to humour it sometimes in order to achieve the desired
results. North American Fidonet software can generally be persuaded to begin
lines where you want them to begin by inserting a blank space or a "-" or a ">"
 or a "*" at the left margin.  However, any line which exceeds the right margin
 someone else uses may be split, mangled, or truncated.  Thus far I have never
felt a need to quote classic literature or lengthy URL's in echoes frequented
by folks who are limited to 40 characters per line.  If I had, I might have
figured out a way of working around the problem.  Meanwhile I trust that anyone
 in the audience here who can't make head nor tail of whatever I'm blathering
about will say so.  ;-)




--- timEd/386 1.10.y2k+
 * Origin: Wits' End, Vancouver CANADA (1:153/716)