Talk:Characters per line

US Government standard?
The article says, "This would ensure at least 1 inch for each margin, with the U.S. government at the time having standardized on 8x11 paper."

If standardized at the time, is the standard still in effect? I think this wording may create an incorrect impression, especially on foreign users. --DThomsen8 (talk) 12:20, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

Origin 132 cpl.
Does 132 cpl come from wide printer paper: width 11 inch * 12 chars/inch (as I suspect)? If so the article should mention this. 93.95.251.162 (talk) 15:09, 1 February 2011 (UTC) Martin.


 * Not that straightforward. Some printers could print 132 (10 cpi), 158 (12 cpi) and 198 (15 cpi) characters per line, that implies the paper width at least 13.2 inches. Other printers could print 132 characters on standard 8 inch wide paper if set to 16.5 cpi. And even 227! 132/133 lines rather came from mainframe line printers. --Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 18:58, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

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Research into readability and maintainability?
Is there any research that has been done on readability for characters per line?

It seems that there is some for printed media (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_length), and that it depends a bit on your proficiency in reading: "For novice readers, text lines should contain between 34 and 60 characters, 45 being the optimal number. Texts for expert readers could contain between 45 and 80 characters, with an optimal count of 60 characters." Also, in the same section, it talks about lines from the point of view of "continuous text lines" which is not the case with any programming language (unless you purposefully obfuscate code or that its part of a generation, e.g., CSS into a single page).

Many languages are indented and various indentation styles prescribed from 2 spaces to tabs that are 8 characters wide. For readability when function names grow (e.g., due to naming conventions) the readability may suffer from breaking up lines instead of letting the text flow.

Does anyone know about any research that has been done in this area?

I would assume though, that as programmers are very accustomed to 80 character line widths, that it might bias/skew results for a number of reasons and that it might be extremely difficult to infuse any objectivity into such a study.... 85.230.90.41 (talk) 10:25, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Terminal History
Would it be worth doing the research to find sources needed to add the history of the terminal? For a decade or so, most interactive input was through a terminal, and they were mostly 80 characters wide. A lot of code was written on these old terminals, which in some ways led to the 80 characters per line standard, as this article already says. But what is the history of the terminal itself, and how is that relevant to line width?

The history of why they were 80 characters wide is interesting, but I don't know any sources. A long time ago there were stations for doing remote submission of punch-card job decks, i.e. not at the counter where the operator was taking the decks themself to feed into readers directly connected to the mainframe. Basically, such a remote station was a card-reader attached to some control electronics to keep things synchronized attached to a long cable back to the mainframe at another location. Then the remote stations became little systems with memory, allowing re-submission of a previous job without having to reread the card deck. As these stations became more capable, they were fitted with better video and keyboard capability, and allowed editing of saved card deck images, and eventually creation of card deck images without needing any physical cards at all. A card deck image is not a graphical picture of punched cards, but a rendition of the characters on the cards. Standard punched cards had 80 columns of characters. Many people called these stations at the end of the long cable back to the mainframe "terminals". These terminal systems were not the same as the terminals that were used a few years later for interactive use that we think of as terminals today. They were for creation and submission of card deck images for batch jobs. They were not cheap, one system might have multiple displays/keyboards so that multiple people could work on their card decks at the same time. However, they were much cheaper than the hardware used by the operator, which was taken out of the budget for procuring the computer in the first place. Remote terminal stations were originally add-ons and were compared to budgets for purchasing card punches. Operator displays tended to be used to monitor the operation of the computer, and could involve a complex separate computer, whereas a remote terminal station was more of an integrated system and as cheap as possible. I think the hardware for raster-scan text display was first made in production so that these remote batch job submission stations could be affordable. Before that, vector hardware was used for displays. Eventually, the more affordable remote terminal stations became used universally, and evolved into the interactive terminals we are familiar with, such as the DEC VT100. However, they still had the 80 character width of the punched card images the systems had originally been designed for.

I just did a quick check for sources for this, and I could not find any. Most of the history in the previous paragraph is from things computer users much older than I had told me when I was much younger. In my quick check, most sources say the interactive video terminal evolved from the keyboard/printer teletype machine, not from keyboard/VDU systems used with remote punched card stations. I could find no reference to what I had heard. So maybe what I had heard was not accurate, and the source of the 80 character display width is still a mystery. 2601:646:9B00:BB90:0:0:0:2467 (talk) 00:46, 18 February 2024 (UTC)