The Art of Plain Text (2015) • Hacker News Board

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#31

Post by sn41 » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 4:09 AM UTC

1. That was a pleasure to read. The limited width of the text columns was really a refreshing change. The link [3] in the page recommends a text width of 4 inches for easy readability. This is quite a useful thing to know, and hardly followed anywhere on the web.

2. Org mode in Emacs is a game changer for me. The pdf output via Latex is quite good. One thing I really used to hate was typing in beamer presentations by hand. Nowadays, I can make a org mode file super-quick and export via beamer to produce a basic PDF presentation.

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#32

Post by every » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 4:22 AM UTC

mmwelt wrote: post #26

every wrote: post #12

128 character US-ASCII is indeed fundamental. It is an almost verbatim translation from the teletypewriter command set: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII

What's wrong with using UTF-8? Disregarding that I may want to write documents in a language that needs non-ASCII characters, I may want to use names of people or places that use non-ASCII characters.

The first 128 characters of Unicode (UTF-8) correspond one-to-one with US-ASCII...

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#33

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 4:27 AM UTC

Author is NetBSD developer. It is still favourite OS of mine when it comes to command line, text-only computer use.

No one ever seems to acknowledge that plain text is the easiest to convert to any other format, while that is generally not the case for other formats. Maybe this is what is meant by "lowest common denominator". Perhaps a term like "most interchangeable format" would put plain text in a better light.

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#34

Post by emptyparadise » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 4:51 AM UTC

>Use only plain ASCII text. You don't know how the text will be processed or what systems will be used to display it. The lowest common denominator -- i.e. ASCII -- will do just fine. Use a simple text editor.

What if I speak Chinese?

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#35

Post by flobosg » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 4:52 AM UTC

I think that GameFAQs needs to be mentioned. The walkthroughs there used ASCII in creative ways to represent tables, maps, headers, title art[1], etc.

[1]: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/remember-how-great-ascii-ar...

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#36

Post by greenyoda » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 5:05 AM UTC

emptyparadise wrote: post #34

>Use only plain ASCII text. You don't know how the text will be processed or what systems will be used to display it. The lowest common denominator -- i.e. ASCII -- will do just fine. Use a simple text editor. What if I speak Chinese?

Or even languages that use the Latin alphabet, but with various accent marks, such as German, French, Spanish, etc.

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#37

Post by greenyoda » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 5:23 AM UTC

throw453566 wrote: post #25

smitty1e wrote: post #5

> Resist the temptation to use images. If you are unable to distill the concepts or thoughts into language, then you have likely not fully understood the problem. Not to diminish a great point, but there is no shame in a simple table or diagram, either. Indeed, given the ambiguities of written language, doubling down on an important point with a graphic or chart reinforces that point and can help broaden the audience…

> If you are unable to distill the concepts or thoughts into language, then you have likely not fully understood the problem. This definitely depends on the situation. Whenever we do QA tests, it's much more effective to just take a screenshot or video of the problem rather than wasting time trying to explain it in text.

But unless you add enough text to adequately describe the problem, nobody will be able to search for that issue later.

As a developer, I find video repros to be particularly bad, since there's a lot of irrelevant stuff in the video that you have to skip over to get to the actual issue. If I get a ticket with a video repro, I always end up having to add a textual description for future reference (and to make life easier for other people who have to handle the ticket). By creating a video repro, you may be saving time for yourself, but wasting time for everyone else who has to understand what the issue is.

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#38

Post by christophilus » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 6:34 AM UTC

tomxor wrote: post #29

throw0101a wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrapping everything in a pre block isn't necessary. For example, look at Daring Fireball : [1][2] which is nicely rendered in a web browser, and very simple when you do a View Source. [1] https://daringfireball.net [2] https://daringfireball.net/2022/02/on_the_origin_of_the_ipho...

It's not bad, but I prefer netmeister's. > Wrapping everything in a pre block isn't necessary. I'm not saying it has to be all or nothing... but I don't see the point in not wrapping in a pre block or equivalent, having a mix is fine, i.e using an anchor or some and tags if you want sure, but if you are going to insert a bunch of LFs in there anyway for your column width, why not also use them for paragraphs separati…

You can use

without cluttering. Put

on its own line and at a different indentation level. I saw someone do this recently, and the plain HTML read just as well as any plaintext doc I ever saw while also rendering perfectly on the phone (which this article doesn’t do thanks to its use of pre).

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#39

Post by emteycz » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 6:51 AM UTC

greenyoda wrote: post #36

emptyparadise wrote: post #34

>Use only plain ASCII text. You don't know how the text will be processed or what systems will be used to display it. The lowest common denominator -- i.e. ASCII -- will do just fine. Use a simple text editor. What if I speak Chinese?

Or even languages that use the Latin alphabet, but with various accent marks, such as German, French, Spanish, etc.

These languages have developed ways to cope because of SMS.

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#40

Post by glacials » Sat, Mar 12, 2022, 8:07 AM UTC

> Resist the temptation to use images. If you are unable to distill the concepts or thoughts into language, then you have likely not fully understood the problem.

This is really hard to agree with. There are some things text just isn’t good for, like sheet music or color theory. There are also many readers and authors for whom big chunks of text are hard to digest.