On 2025-02-27 at 07:46, Andrej Shadura wrote: > Hello, > > On Thu, 27 Feb 2025, at 12:14, Vincent Lefevre wrote: > >> At least, 80-column text remains readable even on small screens, >> contrary to most PDFs, which are also preformatted and are often >> used nowadays (including as email contents), even when this is not >> justified. > > That’s not entirely true: 80-column text often doesn’t fit on mobile > phone screens, and because it’s pre-formatted, it cannot be reflowed > easily, so it ends up an unreadable mess of alternating long and > short lines (the short ones being the result of long ones being > wrapped but not being long enough to actually fill the line).
That *is* a pain to read, agreed. I encounter it on non-mobile as well -
even with a much wider screen - in replies sent by people whose mail
software doesn't handle rewrapping paragraphs as a block, rather than
just cutting each "too-long" line into two, and who don't fix that by
hand before sending.
I still prefer that disadvantage over the disadvantage(s) of
unlimited-length lines.
> I very much prefer long non-preformatted lines to be wrapped by the
> device itself to match the screen it has.
In my case, my screen *is* very much larger, and the mail-reading window
(for a variety of reasons, some of which are probably just inertia, some
of which aren't and would be hard to change because they're on the
design level) is as well. That latter is for multiple reasons; the main
one is because I need the width for the list-of-messages pane, with its
variety of columns, and there's nothing else to be done with that width
for the message-body ("reading") pane, nor any other viable place in the
window to put that latter pane where it wouldn't need to take up that
same width.
But I still don't want long lines, and find them hard to read, at the
lengths that are presented by that combination of screen and window
widths.
I would be greatly displeased by a move to stop disfavoring lines longer
than about what the existing conventions call for; there are already far
too many cases where people send mail that disregards those
conventions, and that already adds to my cost to read such mails, to the
point that I treat seeing it as one of the weights on the side of the
scale for the decision to just ignore that mail as not worth my time to
read.
(I do recognize, however, that the flip side of that may also be true
for people who read in different environments and find the
hard-line-wrapped mails to be harder to read in those environments.)
--
The Wanderer
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all
progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
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