"he had a knotty problem with a word document he was writing. He showed me the screen that had a single line of large point text on it,"
Is that even possible on any word processor? A basic plain text editor, maybe, but as far as I can remember, every word processor I ever used going back to Electric Pencil on a TRS-80 in the late 70's would auto-wrap at the end of the line. Had he somehow managed to set the right margin to something insane?