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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?

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Formatted plain text

Submitted by donford74 on January 22, 2008 - 8:04am.

The Unix “par” command will text-flow paragraphs. It is a newer version of the old Unix “fmt” command, but is definitely smarter. In vi I use it to clean up a section of text. (No, I’m really not trying to trigger a “vi vs. emacs” war, I just could…not…stop…myself…aaahh!)

Some URLs:

http://jmcpherson.org/par.html

http://www.nicemice.net/par/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Par_(command)

The “fmt” command is present in Mac OS X and will do many of the things that “par” will do, if not quite as well.