Merlin’s weekly podcast with Dan Benjamin. We talk about creativity, independence, and making things you love.
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
POSTED IN:
 Plain-text markupSubmitted by matt on January 22, 2008 - 8:52am.
If you're looking for a system that works well for both reading plain-text and as markup for conversion to something prettier, I recommend reStructured Text. It's heavily used in the Python programming community -- lots of tools that can be very easily installed on OSX/Windows/Linux exist -- and there's even a handy website called rst2a that'll accept it and spit back a PDF or HTML file of your text, completely beautified. (rst2a also accepts style sheets, if you don't like any of their defaults.) » POSTED IN:
|
|
| EXPLORE 43Folders | THE GOOD STUFF |
