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I've been using a monospaced font to represent either
code samples or text-terminal dialog.
I usually find that it wants to be wider than my body-text
column, unless I use a size that requires a magnifying
glass.
If it's supposed to represent what the user sees in
a dialog, then I prefer not to wrap it arbitrarily.
But I really hate the look of text that gets wrapped
into "long line, short line, long line, short line..."
Also, some of the screen stuff is tabular, and it
looks like hell -- and reads like it -- if that
kind of text is wrapped.
Now, we add the fact that I've got an otherwise-pleasing
page layout that's:
a) 7.5 inches wide, by 9 inches high
b) divided into a side-head area and a main text column.
MOST of my screen-text or sample-code depictions just
barely fit the full page-width. I don't see a way to
gracefully fit them into the restricted width of the
body-text column.
Some code samples or dialog snippets are just a line
or two.
Some code samples are fifteen pages long.
It looks really silly to return from that to a text
format where suddenly there's a mostly-white-space
column down the left with just the occasional
heading or icon.
Suggestions?
At the meetings, I keep suggesting that we just include
a nice magnifying glass with our product, but I keep
getting shouted down...
/kevin
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