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

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?

Antanova's picture

Q10, Markdown and Pandoc

Strange... I was looking at the same issue recently. How to use plain text more effectively so as to avoid being distracted by e.g. having to type html tags.

I can to the conclusion that I'd give Markdown a go, along with Q10 and Pandoc. I'm a Windows user, I'm afraid and I don't know how cross-platform Q10 and Pandoc are.

I'm still trialling it, but so far it seems a nice way to work, at least for creative output. I don't use Pandoc's extended version of Markdown: I think it's a bit too intrusive and is a move back towards html tagging.

Still, add these to the other suggestions here.

 
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