Here's some text which has been wrapped at 70 columns. This is the way that I format my gopher content most of the time. I was recently surprised to discover that if I turn on the (usually disabled because it's so damn annoying and of limited use) screen rotation feature of my phone, when held sideways (i.e. in landscape orientation) this looks just fine in Pocket Gopher. And my phone screen is way smaller than the modern average. Can anybody *not* read this sideways on a phone? If everybody *can* read this is landscape orientation, I'd say that's a strong argument against current gopher text conventions being a real problem for mobile devices. Sure, holding your phone sideways is a lot clumsier and less convenient than holding it "normally", but most of the content on gopher is not really oriented toward quick, easy, mindless reading, so is this actually a problem? Now I've dropped it down to 60 characters, just a little narrower. I suspect this is still too wide to be read on most phones in a profile orientation. Which is perhaps a shame, as I think this still looks perfectly normal on a laptop terminal. I wouldn't resist formatting all my future phlog posts to this width if it would make peoples' lives easier. Let's go a little bit more narrow, down to 50 characters per line. Actually, even this doesn't look ridiculous on my screen right now. Can anybody read *this* on their phone in portrait orientation? It's still too wide for my phone. 40 characters per line is about the point that I think things start to look a little odd on a real computer, to the point that some people might grumble about things looking weird just to please those upstart phone-using whipper-snappers. Alas, it's just a little too wide to wrap nicely on my phone in portrait mode. I suspect, though, that on more typically sized screens this could actually work nicely? I don't think this is unworkably narrow. The next step down, though, of just 30 characters per line, well...we're not animals. We can't be expected to live like this, can we? It *does* work for me, though. By which I mean that when I view this on my phone without the screen rotated there's no weird line wrapping artifacts. I don't particularly like the way it looks, though. I wonder if... ...bumping things up just a litle more to 35 chars is enough to make much of a difference? This still wraps nicely for me. I wonder if I could get used to reading and writing long entries in this format. You always hear from web designers about how shorter lines are easier to read than longer ones, although IIRC the actual peer-reviewed scientifict literature on this point is full of conflicting results, so maybe that's not true. But I don't think this width is any worse than a newspaper or magazine article. Maybe advanced clients for real computers could actually format articles read this way as multiple side-by-side columns, like a newspaper?