When an article is posted, the text moves from the free-flowing, window-wrapping world of Macintosh text into the 80-column ascii world of Usenet. InterNews tries to do the best it can to wrap the text of your article before sending it. The freely-flowed text in your composition window is chopped up into lines of 72 columns or less. Each line has a return character appended to it. If you put your own return characters into the text, InterNews retains those and honors them as exiting line terminations.
InterNews uses 72 characters instead of 80 for two reasons. First, there is an old convention across the Internet that says that messages should stick to 72 columns in order to appear correctly on very old computer terminals that probably no longer exist. But we wanted to stay with the convention just to be good net cisitzens. The second reason is that 72 column lines leave some "head room" so that an article can be quoted once or twice, signified by prepending a ">" each time as per another common convention, and still fit within 80 columns.
If you do not like the 72 column choice, such as may be the case if you are using to using an 80 column signature, you can change it in the Composing preferences.
