Quoting gregor herrmann (2025-03-07 00:14:19) > On Thu, 06 Mar 2025 14:53:07 +0100, Giuseppe Sacco wrote: > > >I think that even for emails, the line length should be kept at a reasonable > >value in order to maximize the readability. Such value is usually lower than > >80, as shown, for example, in > >https://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability . I do have a large screen, > >but I keep my email/text editors quite narrow in order to allow less than > >100 characters per line. Of course YMMV. > > Thank you for this link.
For completeness sake, I recommend to take newer research into account, which a) questions if longer lines generally harms reading due to flaws in especially one major research project from 2029, and b) points at printed and digital texts affecting readability differently: https://designregression.com/article/line-length-revisited-following-the-research Despite long lines possibly not really *generally* hampering readability, some of us *are* helped by following the typographic conventions of 50-70 chars per line, be it due to e.g. dyslexia or simply years of training our reading skills with print style texts. Yes, some of us are younger, which quite likely means that reading skills have been trained to a larger degree on online media than on printed books, i.e. less commonly following typographic conventions and therefore potentially more fluent in processing long lines. Søren proposes to simply not wrap when composing. That helps reading on narrow width devices, but harms reading on conventional MUAs expecting less than 80 chars per line, and harms reading on wide width devices for some of us. Sure we can then tell folks to change MUA and to resize their windows, but that is not nice to impose of human beings, being creatures of habit. I favor the proposal of continuing to follow the convention of wrapping below 80 chars per line, and ecourage the use of f=f. That helps those stock in the 90s, either mentally or through their choice of arcane MUA, but harms those with large width MUAs and skilled reading long lines, and those reading emails on narrow width devices. But only the (allegedly large) subset of those users who use MUAs not supporting f=f. > Following long lines and than backtracking to the next line is > tedious for me; and if I have to turn my head right and left I'm much > more prone to just delete a mail than to follow through and complete > reading the whole text. -- There's a reason why texts in newspapers > are typically in columns and not across the whole page. > I acknowledge that there are people in Debian whose neck and eyes > are better than mine, and who have less knowledge about email > customs, and who use broken MUAs, and who want me to adjust my > terminal size but I'd like to note anyway that I'm not supporting any > change in the recommendations for Debian mailing lists, and I'll keep > ignoring unreadable emails in the future. Yes, arguably the issue of non-wrapped text causing too long lines is a luxury problem that can be addressed by simply changing window size. But that is asking creatures of habit to change habits, which is a lot. Interestingly, I see this as a combined social and technical issue, and since we are hackers, I favor that we try explore the option of hacking our tools, before giving up and instead impose pressure on the habits of our peers (because obviously *my* habits are a priority, it must be the habits of others that need to change, right?). Let us please continue to respect the ancient rules of email style, and try explore format=flowed, which might be old too but evidently not widely known prior to this thread! - Jonas -- * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt * Tlf.: +45 40843136 Website: http://dr.jones.dk/ * Sponsorship: https://ko-fi.com/drjones [x] quote me freely [ ] ask before reusing [ ] keep private
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