Home › Forums › Popular Topics › Ask 43f ›

Newbie working with plain text: best practices for formatting etc?

Submitted by mjc on January 22, 2008 - 4:13am.

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?

‹ What text files do you use? Synchronization between palm - outlook - google calendar ›
  • 17053 reads

text plus

Submitted by dbtodd on January 22, 2008 - 7:49am.

I used Text Edit (Tiger) for a long time, but do like to dress up the text also. Partly for functionality, partly because I have to look at it every day. I moved to using Bean (bean-osx.com) which adds more formatting tools on top of the Text Edit engine. You can tweak line spacing for example. Making a template is a good idea and very easy.