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The Art of Plain Text (2015)

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Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#61

Post by rhn_mk1 »

pipeline_peak wrote: post #4

Kind of ironic how an article that praises plaintext shows up as absolute garbage on my iPhone with or without reader mode.

From the article:

> End your lines at between 60 and 75 characters, or so. (There's a reason[3] that newspapers and magazines do not use the whole width of their page and instead create much shorter columns.)

The author forgot that the reason is that newspapers and magazines control the medium on which their text will be read, and know how wide the reader's page is.

There's nothing more annoying in the programmer's world than the assumption that the reader will prefer to read prose in monospaced font, in an area that's 80 characters wide.

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#62

Post by xmcqdpt2 »

dusted wrote: post #49

I was on board until "Use only plain ASCII text" Not all languages lend themselves to the ASCII character set. and "If you are unable to distill the concepts or thoughts into language, then you have likely not fully understood the problem." Oh, that must be why IC datasheets have those pesky timing diagrams and pinouts, the designers didn't fully understand the problem. It is strange to see the author put so much wei…

Even English doesn't fit in ASCII! English is often used as the justification for ASCII—by technical types anyway. To use “only plain ASCII text” would mean constraining oneself (no dashes or paired quotation marks, for example). Many English loanwords are accented (outré or soupçon) as are some personal names (Zoë). Some uses of italics are considered mandatory even beyond emphasis, such as when writing the title of a work (The Art of Plain Text).

Restraining the textual representation of English to ASCII due to imaginary technical limitations is ridiculous.

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#63

Post by astrobe_ »

glacials wrote: post #40

> 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.

I think the idea is Uti, non abuti (use, but don't abuse). Counter-counter (sic) examples are not-so-funny meme pictures and emojis. Emojis have gotten so ridiculous in terms of illusion of communication that we have entire websites about their supposed meaning [1].

[1] https://emojitips.com/emoji-meanings/

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#64

Post by hnlmorg »

zero_shift wrote: post #58
hnlmorg wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The age of the article should be taken into consideration here because back then Unicode support was still patchy in places. Not saying I agree with their statement though because even in 2015 it was obvious Unicode was here to stay. But I can at least understand their sentiment. If that were written now I’d wager it would say Unicode rather than ASCII. Or at least I’d really hope it would.

I disagree. Even in 2015, pretending ASCII was a workable universal format involved either pretending non-occidental languages didn't exist, or, as I darkly suspect is the case with many US-based computer scientists, forgetting their existence entirely.

“Universal” has two meaning here:

1. Works with everyone’s language. Which ASCII does not

2. Works on pretty much every machine. Which ASCII does very well.

I’m not defending the use of pure ASCII but if you’re concern is that the text is rendered universally then ASCII wasn’t the worst suggestion a few years back.

What you’re arguing is a different requirement and that’s support for peoples languages. If that’s a concern then ASCII isn’t the right choice.

Those two requirements are not mutually inclusive.

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#65

Post by samatman »

I agree with every point in this article, if we do a global search-replace s/ASCII/utf-8/g.

Seven years ago? I would have felt the same way but the arguments against it would have been persuasive. Now? No, please allow the entire planet to use their native languages, using the One True Encoding, utf-8.

There are also circumstances where a prose line width of 78 is appropriate, we're not all contributing to email chains and a single level of quote-indentation is probably fine.

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#66

Post by glacials »

astrobe_ wrote: post #63
glacials wrote: post #40

> 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.

I think the idea is Uti, non abuti (use, but don't abuse). Counter-counter (sic) examples are not-so-funny meme pictures and emojis. Emojis have gotten so ridiculous in terms of illusion of communication that we have entire websites about their supposed meaning [1]. [1] https://emojitips.com/emoji-meanings/

I don’t believe that is what the author is saying:

> Use illustrations as supplementary, not instead of information.

If anything, the author’s argument explicitly allows meme images and emoji.

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#67

Post by ketzu »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #33

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.

> easiest to convert to any other format

I heard that a lot, but I feel like there are some very narrow assumptions involved. Could you give me some examples so I can better understand what people even mean by that? I am not even sure which other formats people think about in that context.

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#68

Post by RobertMiller »

xmcqdpt2 wrote: post #62
dusted wrote: post #49

I was on board until "Use only plain ASCII text" Not all languages lend themselves to the ASCII character set. and "If you are unable to distill the concepts or thoughts into language, then you have likely not fully understood the problem." Oh, that must be why IC datasheets have those pesky timing diagrams and pinouts, the designers didn't fully understand the problem. It is strange to see the author put so much wei…

Even English doesn't fit in ASCII! English is often used as the justification for ASCII—by technical types anyway. To use “only plain ASCII text” would mean constraining oneself (no dashes or paired quotation marks, for example). Many English loanwords are accented (outré or soupçon) as are some personal names (Zoë). Some uses of italics are considered mandatory even beyond emphasis, such as when writing the title of…

In the corporate world, native or advanced English speakers who might use such loanwords may sometimes be told to knock it off and stick to using a restricted list of very basic English words, about a thousand of them. Rather than getting ESL speakers up to speed, get everybody else to use this 'LCD English'. It's all very demeaning, but if you're adhering to this you'll find that ASCII has you covered.

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#69

Post by RobertMiller »

hnlmorg wrote: post #46
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?

The age of the article should be taken into consideration here because back then Unicode support was still patchy in places. Not saying I agree with their statement though because even in 2015 it was obvious Unicode was here to stay. But I can at least understand their sentiment. If that were written now I’d wager it would say Unicode rather than ASCII. Or at least I’d really hope it would.

> The age of the article should be taken into consideration here because back then Unicode support was still patchy in places

If the article had been written 20 years before it actually was, maybe. You're making me feel old here, 2015 really was not very long ago and little of relevance to this discussion has changed between then and now.

Re: The Art of Plain Text (2015)

#70

Post by plater »

xenodium wrote: post #54

Today, plain text adoption often implies markdown for a richer experience. There are loads of markdown apps on the app stores, but the lesser-known org markup continues to fly under the radar. Quite possibly because of its Emacs origin (and many folks moving to other editors), but org is still plain text (and super powerful). We can all benefit from wider adoption beyond Emacs. I built two org-powered apps for iOS my…

Nice list! For using org-mode on desktop we made EasyOrg, https://easyorgmode.com. With a focus on managing todos for projects and with easy to use agenda and calendar views. More features and improvements being worked on.
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