Re: [art] New RFCs text formatting

["John Levine" <[e-mail]>]

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.

>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