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Newbie working with plain text: best practices for formatting etc?
Matthew Chagnon | Jan 22 2008
Hey all, I've searched far and wide online and am really surprised not to find very much info on this (perhaps I'm using the wrong search terms!). After reading Bit Literacy, I decided that I wanted to starting using plain text files more at work, especially for notes. Unfortunately, years of reading 43F has enhanced my fiddly nature, and I'm more focused on trying to format my notes "correctly," or at least to have some sort of standard to stick to. Does anyone have any best practices (or web resources) for working with text on a page? Currently, I find text files difficult to read (and line breaks confusing). Any thoughts? 26 Comments
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 textSubmitted by pmenair on January 22, 2008 - 7:55am.
Org mode in emacs is nice for plain-text todo lists, scheduling, etc. One of the nice things that it does is it's table-making ability - it gives you well-formatted, plain text "|" delimited tables, which you can easily import to Excel if you want. Or a database, for that matter. This is a nice solution to the classic trade-off between human readability and machine readability for structured data in plain text. Take a look at an xml file. Readable? Not so much. Not sure I understand what is confusing you about line breaks. Are you talking about the unix/mac/pc inconsistencies re what characters or sequences of characters indicate line breaks, or something else? » POSTED IN:
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