Characters per line
max number of monospaced characters allowed on a line
In typography and computing, characters per line (CPL) or terminal width is the maximal number of monospaced characters that may appear on a single line. It is related to the line length in typesetting.
History
The limit of the line length in 70–80 characters may well have originated from various technical limitations of various equipment. The American teletypewriters could type only 72 CPL, while the British ones even less, 70 CPL. In the era of typewriters, most designs of the typewriter carriage were limited to 80–90 CPL. Standard paper sizes, such as the international standard A4, also impose limitations on line length: using the US standard Letter paper size (8.5×11"), it is only possible to print a maximum of 85 or 102 characters (with the font size either 10 or 12 characters per inch) without margins on the typewriter. With various margins – usually from 1–1.5 inches (25–38 mm) for each side, but there is no strict standard – these numbers may shrink to 55–78 CPL.
In computer technology, a line of an IBM punched card consisted of 80 characters. Widespread computer terminals such as DEC's VT52 and VT100 mostly followed this standard, showing 80 CPL and 24 lines. This line length was carried over into the original 80×25 text mode of the IBM PC, along with its clones and successors. To this day, virtual terminals most often display 80×24 characters.
The "long" line of 132 CPL comes from mainframes' line printers. However, some printers or printing terminals could print as many as 216 CPL, given certain extra-wide paper sizes and/or extra-narrow font sizes.
“Characters per line” enters the record as max number of monospaced characters allowed on a line. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Characters, line and number can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Characters per line” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.