Because some gopher clients won't wrap single lines to a console dis play (looking at you, most http proxies), I'm enforcing 68 character s, which the request for comments mentions for compatibility reasons . Automatically hyphenating lines and skipping some spaces turned ou t to be a little tricky, so in the interest of brevity I skipped han dling those for now; the function simply becomes too onerous and con fusing. I put the function I'm using in my new common lisp subfolder of this gopherhole. If I did want to do that, it seems like I should inspect the last tw o characters of the line being printed and the first character of th e next line. If a word would wrap, insert a hyphen, pushing the last character onto the new line. But don't do that if the 68th characte r ended a word. If the +1th character was a space, skip it. I wrote a solution using two counters and a loop housing a cond, but it was too confusing. Further, I can't recover the unhyphenated text, thoug h maybe I wouldn't want to.