[bengotow]

Wait, are bills always typeset like this? It's no wonder it's 1000 pages, there are only ~150 words per page. This would fit in 300 pages if it was book-set (and that doesn't seem like too much to ask everyone to read before voting.)

It's almost like this is designed to be frustrating to read, with narrow lines, split words and extra whitespace. Lovely.

[Robelius]

It also has an .xml extension. For some reason, I always imagined someone writing bills in Microsoft Word.

Now I'm curious. I assume they used typewriters before XML, and and writing before that. Anyone know how the length of the bills have changed over time, and how that maps to different technologies?

[robjan]

This document was probably written in WordPerfect which is popular in the legal profession due to the typesetting options. It stores its documents in XML format.

[robjan]

This is how legal documents are always written. It's a convention that goes back to the typewriter days which never changed.