Subject: Re: [art] New RFCs text formatting

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 05 Dec 2019 01:54:32 -0500

--On Sunday, December 1, 2019 14:09 -0500 John Levine
<[email-masked]> wrote:

> In article
> <[email-masked]>
> 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.

I had really hoped to avoid getting into this, but Keith is
right.  There may well have been other considerations and, if
there were, any comments about which was the most important
would be close to pure speculation.  One would have to ask Jon
or Joyce to get a definitive answer and that would be very
difficult.  However, I was involved in conversations in which
Jon pointed out that, since A4 paper was narrower and longer
than letter size, the appropriate thing to do was to determine
print area width on the basis of A4 and length on the basis of
letter-size.  He also considered side margins of about a half
inch to be the minimum acceptable.   At the nominal ten
characters per inch, a 72 character line come out as 7.2 inches.
And half inch margins on both sides and one gets 8.2 inches.  A4
is 210 mm wide or 8.27 inches.  It would be incorrect to assume
that is a coincidence.

If one were making the same decisions with today's technology
and ideas about aesthetics, the answers might well be different.
But it is incorrect to assume that issues like international
differences in papers sizes were unknown or deliberately ignored.

best,
   john