ITT: We talk about text files. Any subject, any genre, but it has to be plaintext.
Gopher and Usenet FAQs can come along too, I guess.
Start writing text files
Cooper Smith
Other urls found in this thread:
textfiles.com
khzae.net
getfo.org
twitter.com
Thomas Robinson
textfiles.com
How many of these still work?
Henry Brown
they're files which contain text.
Bentley Lee
I've tried a few of them and while some of them are still up as regular sites the FTP part is dead. Shame, some of them look quite interesting.
Anthony Collins
Text files are really comfy. I love how they would differentiate parts in a series by giving them special extensions, like FILE.PT1, FILE.PT2, etc. Something about that structure is really cute. I've got a whole bunch of saved fanfictions from an FTP that went down about a decade ago and its full of cute things like that.
Matthew Davis
I don't like text files. They don't even have image file support. Hard to make schematics and shit.
Alexander Perry
Is it a sin to not write text files directly, but produce them from XML via pandoc? I do a lot of that so I can produce plain text (for Gopher), Markdown (for GitHub/GitLab), groff (for manpages), and a PDF from the same source.
Aaron Hall
they only contain text if you interpret them as such
Kevin Sanchez
Pandoc can convert to text in that way?
Oliver Russell
Sure, -t plain. Produces something like markdown but without the extra semantic markup (hence, 'plain' is not a valid input format, only output)
Ian Sanders
Oh, that. I thought you meant it would centre headings and suchlike.
You could always just use nroff if you want to be that simple.
Adrian Murphy
For some I convert to groff man macros with pandoc, and then use nroff to produce a formatted plain text file for viewing on my gopher:
khzae.net
An equivalent of TeXML for *roff would be better. I need to improve my knowledge of *roff a little more before I try and create one though.
getfo.org
Luis Hall
I miss text files, or rather the environment around them, where you spent more time WITH something interesting rather than searching for it. Never really got the appeal of "surfing the web" because it's invariably a huge waste of time.
Kayden Watson
Any suggestions on how to format plain text files?
I've got several larger text files and I've been having a hard time settling on a consistent way to format it into sections, paragraphs, etc.
I figured some existing markup syntax would be good. Maybe what wikipedia uses. I've also been considering LaTeX syntax since I use my text editor for that anyway.
Brayden Diaz
What do you mean? Paragraphs are just lines of text in groups, then a blank line between.
As for sections? I suppose it's up to you. I've always liked how people got inventive with how it's done, like
=====[ Part number and name ]=====
or
_____/ Part name or number \_____
Lincoln Evans
Yeah, paragraphs was a silly example.
>As for sections? I suppose it's up to you
Obviously. I was hoping someone had any experiences. I do edit some wikipedia pages and the markup it uses for sections of varying hierarchy is pretty well readable in plain text format as well.
Usually I use something like
== chapter ==
=== section ===
====subsection ====
But I wanted to do some macros and shortcuts so I have to type less and I figured I'd ask for other peoples' experiences before I commit to a style.
Brandon Roberts
Tfw gamefaqs autistic faqs from late 90s
Robert Sanchez
do you guys know that if you right click your browser and go view source, every webpage turns into a text file?
Jordan Fisher
end your bloodline
you're too autistic to live
Levi Myers
Upload them somewhere or make them public
Nicholas Russell
text isn't a tool for everything. If you need images that's a different use case.