At 02:00 AM 12/8/96 -0800, Shiaw Kang Chi wrote:

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:

How "not very new and not very capable"?  I am currently running WinDoze 3.1
and NutScrape on a 386sx33 with a massive 4 megs RAM.  While I have run a
BBS (under DOS) on a 286-12 at 14.4kbps for several years, it is a rather
damning indictment of WinDoze that it bombs if I attempt to set the port
above 9600.

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?!

That's just too long of a line length, what I love are the ones where each
line is a whole paragraph (one line in the neighborhood of 400+ char long)
because of an entire lack of linefeeds.

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.

I should look at the FFML FAQ and re-write the 'how to post/format' section.
Nearly every word processor I have seen has a 'save as ASCII' function.
Even Superdude's portable word processor (one of the "almost" smart
typewriter thingies) can save as ASCII.  Any ideas on how to get people to
actually use it?

James Allen
Omnedon @ Black Hole [MI] (C-86Net)
jallen9@mail.idt.net