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Thoughts on the ext4 panicThoughts on the ext4 panicPosted Oct 30, 2012 18:53 UTC (Tue) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458)In reply to: Thoughts on the ext4 panic by ikm Parent article: Thoughts on the ext4 panic
According to Poynton's "Ten Common Mistakes in the Typesetting of Technical Documents", a 66-character line of text is widely considered ideal for readability. I've seen other claims in the same vein (e.g. in the LaTeX memoir and KOMA packages documentation, aimed at serious book-writing). The 80 characters come from the IBM punched cards of yore, but their design in turn surely wasn't completely random either. The decree from the $POWERS_THAT_BE is enshrined in the Linux coding style; trying to change that is futile (or at least, there are more fruitful outlets for your creative energies).
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Thoughts on the ext4 panic Posted Oct 30, 2012 21:00 UTC (Tue) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
80 characters was based on 10 characters per inch on standard typrwriters combined with 8 1/2" wide paper and the fact that you needed margins of ~1/4" to avoid problems with trying to type up to the edge of the paper.
When teletypes were built, they used the same print mechanisms and so had the same limits.
When terminals were built, they mimicked the printed stuff (so that you could see everything that you could see on the paper, and it was a waste to have anything wider, since the people who were still using paper wouldn't be able to see it)
IBM punch cards were 80 columns to match the paper as well.
The problem is none of these are good reasons any longer.
As for the ideal column width to read, go do some research on why newspapers use such narrow columns, the ideal width for reading is surprisingly narrow, and NOT 66 characters.
a paperback book is about the outer edge of what a good width is (no matter what the font size)
Thoughts on the ext4 panic Posted Nov 4, 2012 23:37 UTC (Sun) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]
> As for the ideal column width to read, go do some research on why newspapers use such narrow columns, the ideal width for reading is surprisingly narrow, and NOT 66 characters.
Source code and newspaper articles are quite different types of "literature". The are typically laid out in extremely different ways. It would be a very surprising coincidence if their "ideal widths" were the same.
Thoughts on the ext4 panic Posted Nov 6, 2012 18:25 UTC (Tue) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]
Newspaper columns are as narrow as they are because that lets the publisher fit more stuff on a page and cut paper costs, not because narrow columns are especially easy to read.
Newspapers even go to the trouble of having special fonts designed for them (where do you think Times Roman got its name?) in order to be able to cram more type into a narrow column, thus making the effective column width greater.
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