Too many search engines fail when words are hyphenated. There are all sorts of ways to remove hard returns in one second. It takes more time to complain than to actually find one of these and use it. . . . In many ways complainers have not evolved past Medieval Times. On Tue, 8 Sep 2009, Lee Passey wrote:
Greg M. Johnson wrote:
In order to prevent me from making the suggestion of changing the whole collection, can someone tell me why that number of characters on the screen was chosen?
In 1985 virtually all interactions with computers were performed via "smart terminals," predominately the DEC VT-52 and VT-100, which presented only text in an 80 x 25 array, that is, 25 lines each having at most 80 characters. The characters could be highlighted by reversing the electron output on the CRT (i.e. using 'on' instead of 'off', and vice-versa) but any other manipulation of the font, such a italic, bolding, or even a different font, was simply not possible. Even most personal computers of that day used VT-100 emulation.
At that same time, we were being taught in typing class that left margins should be 66 characters; the bell would be set at 60, at which point the typist needed to decide whether the current word would fit in the 66 character limit, or whether it needed to be hyphenated.
In 1985 the principals at Project Gutenberg did not want to deal with hyphenation, so no words were hyphenated. The current line length of Project Gutenberg files was designed so no word in unhyphenated form would ever cause a line to exceed 80 characters and wrap to a new line on a typical 1985-era smart terminal.
In most ways, Project Gutenberg has not progressed beyond 1985. _______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d