Re: Man-width on terminals

[Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org>]

> With more inter-line whitespace, you can have longer lines.  The
> maximum reasonable length for the contents of a line with lots of
> inter-line whitespace turned out to be about 70 characters.  Computer
> terminals have the whitespace needed, so they are seldom narrow.  And,
> for the same reason, terminals seldom had more than 80 characters.
> (That is also why cards on which FORTRAN was written had only 80
> characters.)
>
> Of course, if you wish to make your manual page width be less than 70
> characters, that is fine.  I am against long lines that need more
> inter-line whitespace than many writers provide.

As an xterm can have arbitrary width, users are free to resize it to the
comfortable width.  And I think Man should fill the text to a width
preferred by the user (there is a special option `Man-width').

-- 
Juri Linkov
http://www.jurta.org/emacs/