On Sat, 7 Dec 1996, Bob Barnes wrote:

I'm not sure how this request will be received, but I want to try to ask as
many fan fic authors as possible, so I'll post it here.  I really wish that
the authors and/or the folks who edit the fan fic file for output to the
world would pay more attention to line lengths in the file.  

Hm.. okay..

If the lines are longer than the display width of the computer that they
are being read on, it can be annoying as hell to try to read the story. 
Here's an example of what I mean.  I was trying to read a story from the
Ranma "The More Things Change" saga from the web pages that they are
available on.  With my current not very new and not very capable
computer, this is what I saw in Netscape: 

 ===============================================
                          PART I
 It's The End of the World as We Know It (and I 
 ===============================================

[SNIP]

ouch, cutoff.

Now, it's true that there was a horizontal scroll bar at the bottom, but can
you imagine how annoying it would be to have to click it twice for every
line of text?!

Life isn't fair, is it?

Hm... from the above information, I'm assuming
1) you didn't want to increase the width of your browser
2) you can't increase the width of your browser (having a 'not very new
   and not very capable' machine and such)

Fan Fic Authors, please please take a look at the line length in your final
output files and keep them fairly short.  Around about 60-65 characters per
line makes for a much, much easier to read file.

Actually, the given universal standard is 78 characters per line.  Also,
when it was first written, I was intending to put it out to the fanfic
mailing list, and rec.arts.anime.stories, where 78 is also the rule of
thumb.

The reason why the story is STILL in 78 character per line format is
because it takes quite a bit of time to go through that story (it totals
about 460K I believe, or close to it) and narrow it down.  As of late, I
don't have enough free time to do that particular chore.  Also, strange as
it may sound, some people DON'T like it when the width is too narrow (I
have no idea why, though).

The only 'quick fix' to the width problem, a program by... Mike Loader, I
think... or was it Ben Kosse... drats, my apologies to the creator of that
program, anyways, that program still has one or two glitches left to iron
out.

One of these days, I'll see about setting the stories to HTML format so
that they automatically adjust to the width of the browswer, but until
then I apologize for the inconvenience.

-rpm, wondering how Bert keeps all his stuff in that nice and narrow
      format...