Re: [art] New RFCs text formatting

[Brian E Carpenter <[e-mail]>]

Scott,

On 02-Dec-19 09:36, Scott O. Bradner wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Dec 1, 2019, at 3:33 PM, Brian E Carpenter <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>
>> On 02-Dec-19 08:09, John Levine wrote:
>>> In article <[e-mail]> you write:
>>>> I thought the format was a compromise between US Letter format, A4 
>>>> format, and printers.
>>>
>>> I thought it was 72 characters because that's how many you got on a
>>> punch card, leaving 8 for the sequence number.
>>
>> Keith is right and it was one of Postel+Reynolds's wiser decisions. The only case where it goes wrong is with software or printers that fail to recognise the FF (form feed) character correctly.
>>
>> Phill is correct that it wastes some white space; that's the price of fitting into both paper sizes. When I print drafts, which is rarely, I do it "booklet" style which limits waste paper considerably.
>>
>> As we discussed 3 years ago, numbered pagination is useful in a printable format but irrelevant in a screen-only format.
> 
> except for references - section numbers are frequently far too far apart when you want to point someone to a particular
> chunk of text

Yes. I sometimes use page numbers for that reason, like https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3056#page-15 (random example with no significance). For new-format HTML, any internal <xref/> should generate a link.

    Brian

> 
> Scott
> 
>>
>> Can we stop now?
>>
>>     Brian
>>>
>>>> What would be parochial would be to assume that nobody in the world 
>>>> needs to print RFCs using mechanical printers any more - that everyone 
>>>> in the world should have laser printers, ample power for their fusers, 
>>>> and a generous supply of suitable paper and toner -
>>>
>>> I think that if you price all the printers made in the past decade or
>>> two, you'll find that there are a lot of laser and inkjet printers and
>>> close to nothing else, certainly nothing restricted to fixed pitch
>>> text.  The only mechanical printers I recall seeing in recent years
>>> are antique Okidata dot matrix units printing whatever it is they
>>> print at airport gates.
>>>
>>> R's,
>>> John
>>>
>>>
>>
> 
>