Re: [art] New RFCs text formatting

["Scott O. Bradner" <[e-mail]>]

> 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

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
>> 
>> 
>