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From: wmartin@brl-smoke.ARPA (Will Martin )
Newsgroups: net.sci,net.politics,net.philosophy,net.news
Subject: Please desist from embedding Ctrl-L's
Message-ID: <775@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: Mon, 12-May-86 15:33:28 EDT
Article-I.D.: brl-smok.775
Posted: Mon May 12 15:33:28 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 24-May-86 21:47:30 EDT
Distribution: net
Organization: USAMC ALMSA, St. Louis, MO
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Xref: watmath net.sci:924 net.politics:16306 net.philosophy:5438 net.news:4902

I have noticed a distressing trend lately -- some posters embed
numerous CTRL-L characters in their postings. When you display
such postings on a screen, it causes many delays and requires that the
reader hit the space bar frequently to get through the posting. When
such postings are dumped to print for later off-line reading, they waste
much paper, often with only a few lines per printed page.

The only reason to include Ctrl-L's in a posting is to paginate a long
document into actual printed-output pages, and to insure that printers
will get top-of-form correct, such as having one at the start to keep
the header info on a separate page from the data. It is not "neat" or
"clever" to include multiple Ctrl-L's in posted text just to force
displays to pause between each of your paragraphs -- it is merely
irritating and annoying (and will therefore detract from the points you
are trying to make, not help them).

(Perhaps a line could be added to network-etiquette documentation
disparaging such practices?)

Will