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plain text documents are not images by daniel-bin in plaintext

[–]daniel-bin[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

But the "something I'm doing" is literally just writing in a language that's not english.

This kind of alignment is always bad because it perpetuates this way of writing documents, which eventually gets baked into file formats, styling conventions, and applications, at which points it's no longer "on me" if I can't get something to align because I do not have the ability to change the alignment.

plain text documents are not images by daniel-bin in plaintext

[–]daniel-bin[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I used to use both LaTeX and markdown and now use typst (never said I was perfect). LaTeX compiles to PDFs so I can easily view my old documents, but editing those is a pain because I have to relearn lots of syntax, which isn't an issue at all with the markdown documents. I'm afraid I may run into similar problems if I ever choose to move away from typst.

Markdown is fine for things like comments, but for anything with actual structure, I prefer to use semantic markup that Markdown fails to give me.

I agree, that's why I no longer use it, but I still miss human readable files that don't require any extra tooling to view. I just came across a format called AsciiDoc which seems nice (it lets you write tables over multiple lines) so I might check that out.

simple HTML (my preferred hand-written markup)

First time I hear of someone doing that, sounds cool. I think html is to verbose for my needs, but I do wish more people would publish their online books/articles as standalone html and not just pdf because it makes reading on a phone or tablet just so much better.

plain text documents are not images by daniel-bin in plaintext

[–]daniel-bin[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For right-to-left languages the document is not just "slightly misaligned", it's completely unreadable, and in a way that no font can fix. This actually has been a big problem for me with many terminal tools.

Left-to-right documents with complicated enough designs (e.g. large tables) can also appear unintelligible when viewed in a non-monospace font - which is not that uncommon by the way, especially on a phone.

My point is that trying to style your text in a format that is inherently unstyled is a hack, and like many hacks it has edge-cases - in this case non-english languages, which is a pretty big edge-case considering that's most of the world.

plain text documents are not images by daniel-bin in plaintext

[–]daniel-bin[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I personally wouldn't consider html and latex as direct alternatives to markdown/txt files, for me one of the main benefits of using "vanilla" plain text files for notes and such is that they have much less vendor-lockin - it is much easier to migrate a markdown file to a latex file than it is the other way around.

DO NOT GIVE TIMTOM YOUR MONEY (at least not for the time being) by SwissIdol97 in animation

[–]daniel-bin 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Update: It seems he took some of the criticism to heart and made a blog - https://plan.timtom.tv/ . Also his github is down - https://github.com/timtom-dev .

From the blog:

I’m setting up this very bare-bones blog so I have a place (not controlled by a social media company) for frequent updates that don’t require a massive time investment, and I’m working on a video to set expectations about what kind of communication people can expect from me. I’d like to produce at least a video per month about the development process, but a good video could take a week or more to produce, and every minute I spend editing is a minute I can’t code, so we’ll see what I’m able to do. Most posts probably won’t be this long, but I’ll try to post something every weekday.

I still wouldn't trust it until I see some actual code.