
Number of Characters per HN Line - graycat
On one page at HN today, I saw a line with 161 characters.  Traditionally in formatted text, 161 is way more than usual.  In Firefox on my screen, by the time I get the magnification small enough to show the whole line, the characters are way too small to read.  Really, for the whole tread, I can&#x27;t read it.<p>Please limit the number of characters per line to something easy to read, say, 60.  Thanks.
======
jcr
graycat, could you dig through your browser history and email me the given
link (email in profile)? I know you were being kind and intentionally avoiding
revealing the specific post.

In most cases, lines that are so long that they make a mess of the usual HN
display are handled to prevent making browsers need to do side scrolling. I
have a hunch that I know what happened but I'd like to look at the example.

[http://paulgraham.com/gfaq.html](http://paulgraham.com/gfaq.html) > _" Why is
the text on your site so narrow? It wastes screen space."_

> _" The aim of web design is not to use all available screen space. It is
> legibility. Text is most legible with no more than 70 characters per line."_

~~~
graycat
The thread was

[http://www.polygon.com/2014/7/15/5897811/ninja-pizza-girl-
te...](http://www.polygon.com/2014/7/15/5897811/ninja-pizza-girl-teenage-
girls-family-dev)

My post was

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8045788](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8045788)

That post and that thread have a lot of lines with 161 or so characters.

~~~
jcr
As promised, I looked into it and did some testing. There's an old trolling
tactic of posting something excessively long (wide, actually) so the browser
expands the width of page beyond the width of the screen. The result is a
side-scrolling page that is difficult to read. The code behind HN and most
forum software have detection and mitigation for these types of side-scrolling
attacks. If you had found something that was successfully blowing out the
width of the page into a side-scroller then that would be a HN bug worth
reporting.

The screenshot below is with a slightly older Firefox version 18.0.2 using a
newly created user profile, without any plug-ins or add-ons, so everything is
at default settings. The menu colors and green-on-black text colors are due to
how the underlying graphics toolkit (gtk) used by firefox is configured on the
system.

As you can tell from the image size, the display is running at 1920x1080
resolution, and although it doesn't matter, the screen is 18.5 inch diagonal
(408mm x 230mm).

[http://www.designtools.org/pix/graycat01.png](http://www.designtools.org/pix/graycat01.png)

The longest line displayed in the image is 250 characters when using default
browser settings and font (typeface) sizes. If you increase the font size, you
decrease the number of characters per line. For example this image has 137
characters per line.

[http://www.designtools.org/pix/graycat01a.png](http://www.designtools.org/pix/graycat01a.png)

Setting "Preferences -> Content -> Fonts & Colors -> Advanced Button ->
Minimum Font Size" can save your eyesight at the cost of making some badly
written websites look worse than usual.

If the default display is still too wide for your tastes when using a larger
font size, you have two options; (1) reduce the width of your browser window,
or (2) write a browser plugin or addon to reformat everything to the way you
want it.

HN allows for posting pre-formatted text in comments for when someone wants to
post source code. The reason is the typical re-wrapping of text in a browser
would make a real mess of source code formatting. To post pre-formatted text
(code) to HN, just insert two leading spaces at the start of the pre-formatted
lines. Unfortunately, this feature often gets accidentally misused for things
like quotes. An example of misuse is in your own post:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8042618](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8042618)

You indented the URL to businessinsider.com with spaces, so it was turned into
pre-formatted text and was not rendered as a clickable URL.

If you're curious about formatting options on HN, they're listed here:

[http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc](http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc)

Since HN does not re-wrap the pre-formatted text, it can be wider than the
page, and would normally make a side-scrolling display, but by using CSS, only
the pre-formatted portion has a horizontal scroll bar. In the image below, you
can see how these "too-wide" lines are in their own little scrollable boxes.

[http://www.designtools.org/pix/graycat02.png](http://www.designtools.org/pix/graycat02.png)

Side-scrolling little boxes of text might be annoying, but it's better than
making a mess of pre-formatted source code, so it's supposed to work this way.

If for some reason you're not getting the little scrollable boxes for the
excessively long pre-formatted lines, then either your browser is much older
than mine (unlikely) or some configuration, plugin, or addon you're using is
making a mess of things. You can test this by creating a new user profile in
firefox.

You mentioned ms-office, so it seems you're still running ms-windows. I think
firefox on ms-windows creates a startup link to its profile manager on
installation, but if I'm wrong, just use the command line:

    
    
      C:/> firefox -ProfileManager
    

If you're still seeing excessively long pre-formatted lines without being in
little scrollable boxes, then you'll need to update your web browser.

If you're having trouble with something else (and I've totally misunderstood
you), then please post link to a screen capture image of what you're seeing,
or you could email it to me if you prefer.

~~~
graycat
Thanks for the detailed response.

I didn't really think that the lines with 161 characters were pre-formatted.

Most of the pages at HN look fine on my version of Firefox -- 27.0.1.

I have understood and used the HN feature for pre-formatted simple text, say,
programming language source code, and I'm sorry about indenting the URL. I'll
try not to do that in the future.

I would have expected that if a formatted page is too wide for the Firefox
screen window, then there would be horizontal scroll bars at the bottom of the
HN window in Firefox. Looking at some CSS documentation, apparently there is a
CSS keyword overflow-x which controls, at least for a DIV, if there are
horizontal scroll bars.

In the HTML/CSS of the Web pages I've written, I said nothing about overflow-x
and get scroll bars when the data to be displayed is larger than the
associated Firefox window. I don't know why that isn't standard on Web pages.

Thanks for your help.

------
anigbrowl
No disrespect, but surely that's your problem? Having a widescreen monitor, I
appreciate that HN (mostly) takes advantage of it, instead of having most of
the screen sitting empty while a relatively narrow colums of text occupies the
middle. I find this easy to read and having long lines reduces the need to
scroll as much.

If it's not working for you, perhaps a restyling plugin like Stylebot for
Chrome or something similar would allow you to adjust the format to your
taste.

~~~
graycat
> No disrespect, but surely that's your problem?

Not really: I have what is called a 17" screen. Such a screen size may still
be common on desktop computers and has to be common on laptop computers. For
tablets and smart phones, the screen widths are much narrower.

My solution is to copy the text to the clipboard, copy it into my favorite
editor, and use a macro I wrote that reflows lines but honors the existing
left margins.

The screen I have was a relatively large screen when I bought it. But, sure,
the next time I buy a computer, and, thus, put up with all the struggle of
getting all my software running and configured again, e.g., get the 2003
version of Microsoft Office running with all its many updates, no doubt I will
get a wide screen.

Still, there is an issue: Readability. E.g., long newspapers used pages, like
screens, so wide that they could easily have had 161 characters per line but,
still, stayed with narrow columns, supposedly for 'readability'. There are
suggestions that a narrow column permits less left to right eye movement.

On readability, in

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8046141](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8046141)

below in this thread is

> "The aim of web design is not to use all available screen space. It is
> legibility. Text is most legible with no more than 70 characters per line."

~~~
anigbrowl
I had a 17" screen until last year. I can't say I recall this being a problem,
but then I consider layout of plain text something that should ultimately be
managed at client side.

