Quote:
Originally Posted by barnacle
What I don't want:
...
- Carriage returns at the end of each line (what were you *thinking*, Gutenberg?)
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At the time the Gutenberg standard was written the only type of computer terminals (understand displays) available to mere mortals were text terminals that had at best 80 characters per line. Line wrap that we consider one of fundamental features of modern applications for working with text was an exotic feature.
Even one of the best text editors of that time - vi - had only very limited support for long lines.
So the standard was set in a way that would enable anybody, with even lousiest equipment to read the book.
My very first computer had a 40 character text line and an average e-book would fit in several of 170kB one-sided 5 1/4 inch flopy disks (not that I had such luxury. I had to use magneto-phone cassettes (15 minutes of loading for 64kB document))
By the way, PocketBook reader can reformat "plain, vanilla text" Gutemberg books automatically. It will run lines in paragraph together (and will add spaces between words where necessary) and will make paragraphs only if:
- there is empty line between paragraphs
- the first line of paragraph is indented by a few spaces or tabs