[gopher] Re: Width of text files

[Ralph Furmaniak <sugaku@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> I am a boy from Italy, 18 in a month or so, and I'm interested in all 
> the technologies that have been "forgotten", just like Gopher. Too bad I 
> didn't live the first Gopher era, but I was a bit too young... :)

I don't usually say this, but I'm 16 <g>

> The question is: how wide should I make the text files available via 
> gopher? 80 columns?

Some people mentioned that 80 will work, but I found that since the client 
might put in spaces and other stuff that it should be a smaller number.  I 
setup Bucktooth to wrap to 65, mostly because this is the optimal line length 
in typesetting (easiest to read).  It only wraps info lines, so as to keep it 
from wrapping perl scripts like it used to.  For creating files you can use an 
editor that automagically wraps the lines or you can use barebones HTML (ie h1 
h2, title, ...).  Unlike others I find no problem putting in a bit of HTML on 
my gopher (even though I have not done this yet) as long as it is more text 
than hyper.  I would myself probably use a LaTeX document converted into HTML.