[rfc-i] Pagination requirements

[Julian Reschke]

On 2012-05-24 19:43, Joe Touch wrote:
> ...
>> Believe it or not, even if we you take mobile devices out of the picture
>> there are still different screen sizes. "Refloweable" is also essential
>> when you want to be able non-monospaced fonts.
>
> Only if you care about full text justification. Otherwise,
> variable-width fonts display .txt just fine (with the exception of ASCII
> diagrams, of course - but reflow destroys those too).
> ...

Oh my.

First of all, a format that supports reflowing of course needs to 
understand what is monospaced. HTML does this. We have discussed this 
here multiple times. It's really annoying that you keep bringing it up 
as it was a hard problem nobody has solved.

That being said, text/plain indeed can be displayed in a variable-width 
font, but that will not work well, because:

- we have indentations that rely on character width (such as certain 
list types), and

- one point of using a variable-width font is to increase the amount of 
text that fits into a line, and having a hard line break of course makes 
that impossible.

Best regards, Julian