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?
- 17099 reads
Plain-text markup
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.)