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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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 Re: Newbie working with plain text: best practices for formattinSubmitted by mdl on January 23, 2008 - 9:00am.
It all depends on what you use the text for: whether you want personal databases or are writing longer prose. 1) For database dumps and notes, I usually use long lines, with no breaks (one bit of information per line, so to speak). That makes it really easy to fetch bits of information with grep. I make my own quick and dirty "fields" by using a custom delimiter, in my case two colons (::). Thus if I want more structure output from my database, I can use awk. I do this, for instance, with research notes. Each bit of information goes on a single line in the following structure: That way, using awk, I can search just in the tags field, just in the source field, etc. And I can even sort all the notes from an individual source by page. Otherwise, I also keep quick and dirty database files with no real structure. Grep still works its magic. 2) For prose, I break text at 72 characters per line and use the magic of "gq" in Vim to make it look nice and pretty. Vim is really wonderful for outlining while writing. You can create a quick outline and then fill in indented text beneath each outline heading. 3) Finally, I use LaTeX for anything fancy. » POSTED IN:
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