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.  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 
 ===============================================


                            [Evening, September]

   The sun set on another dull Nerima day.  Through tired
figure in a restaurant watched the setting sun, relieved 
over and wondering how many more he could take. 
   The grim demeanor he cast today was the aftereffects o
unexpected and traumatic events of his life.  It had been
months since his life went to hell, and yet he still hurt


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?!

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.

Thank you,

Bob Barnes
rbarnes@moscow.com
Moscow, Idaho

When opportunity comes, the trick is to CATCH the red hat.

I know it can be annoying as hell, but when I first started posting
things, my Word 6 format kept doing that.  I went through much hell and
trouble to finally fix MOST of the bugs, and I still have an occasional
problem.  Sometimes, it's just a real big pain in the ass to fix some of
these problems.  I try to do it most of the time, but sometimes I'm just
to damn tired to bother.  I know it's annoying, but sometimes try to live
with it, especially if it's a great story, who cares about the alignment.
Jya Ne
Shiaw Chi "Hokodan"
chihokodan@aol.com

"Life's funny... so laugh."
-I made that quote up all by myself!