Text reflow woes (or: I want bullets back!)y

[solderpunk]

Okay, I'm ready to cautiously, tentatively pick this question up again.
Even while I've been away I've tried to mull this one over.

One particular thought I've seized upon is this: the *only* good reason
to add the complexity of defining any kind of markup syntax is so that
clients can wrap Gemini content at arbitrary widths without breaking all
the very nice and useful and valuable formatting abilities which
text/plain already provides with Zen-like simplicity.  If nobody ever
tried to wrap text to new widths, people could *just write* Markdown
(whatever Markdown means to them) and it would work and look nice, and
fancier clients could optionally render some parts of it in visually
appealing ways.  Basically, text wrapping/reflowing is the complicating
factor here.  Text wrapping will break nice formatting of lists and
tables and things absent some markup for identifying lists and tables
and things, and detailed rules on how to render those items to arbitrary
width.

The *only* reason that wrapping/reflowing is such a hot topic is the
combination of the two facts:

i)  Most people producing Gopher content format it for 70 or 80 columns,
    following various presciptions of Ancient Lore (NB: there are some
    interesting exceptions, e.g. trnslts at rawtext.club offers all their
    content in the user's choice of 40, 72 or 120 chars!).
ii) More and more people consuming Gopher content are doing it on
    phones, tablets and other newfangled devices which can't display 70
    or 80 columns neatly so that things look weird.

(At least, I assume this is the reason there's so much demand for this.
If anybody thinks this is wrong, I'd love to hear it)

Point ii) above is not going to change any time soon, in fact it's only
going to become increasingly common as time goes on, whether the
retrogrouches amongst us like it or not.  But point i) is just an
arbitrary convention and so entirely mutable.

This raises the question: is there a number of characters at which
text/gemini content could be, by convention, wrapped by the author such
that it displays nicely on a majority of mobile devices whilst not
looking ridiculous on real displays?

At
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/files/text-wrapping-experiment.txt
I have some text wrapped at 70, 60, 50, 40, 30 and finally 35 columns.
Using Pocket Gopher on my phone, I can read text wrapped at 70 columns
no worries if I hold the phone in landscape orientation.  In portrait I
need 35, which admittedly doesn't look quite right on my laptop screen.
But I think my phone screen is atypically small, and I wonder if maybe
40 would be workable for a lot of people?  Feedback from actual device
users very welcome...

-Solderpunk