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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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 Yay restructured text!Submitted by Sympleko on January 24, 2008 - 6:29am.
I'm also a fan of restructured text and emacs. There's an emacs mode for for ReST which does nice syntax coloring. Also it's really easy to word-wrap (M-q or M-x auto-fill-mode) in emacs, even in indented things like bulleted lists. But vi's nice too! <duck /> You can extend ReST to give it as much structure as you want, without losing the human-readability and -writeability. The docutils package allows you to convert to HTML or LaTeX. I use it for writing web pages because I can isolate the "writing" and "formatting" parts of my brain. But if you wanted to do something fancier on a ReST document, you can convert it to a docutils "native" XML file and do whatever you want. » POSTED IN:
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