Text files

What does Sup Forums think of text files as a way of spreading information and documents? Still useful, or totally pointless in the age of infographics and HTML?

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Plaintext is almost always the correct medium

let's start a poor man's internet by piggybacking on amateur radio wavelengths and sending text files back and forth.

you can write text in text files
most people can read text, if it is in their own language
reading informs people
therefore text files can spread information

I always use .txt for storing data if it is small projects

>open a jpg/png file made on linux/mac in windows
>it works
>open a html/pdf file made on linux/mac in windows
>it works
>open a text file made on linux/mac in windows
>it doesn't work

Therefore, text is less portable and readable on modern systems than an image file, making the alleged "readability" of text files no longer true in the current year.

If you read more than you write or if readability is a priority then formatted text (pdf, latex, odt, docx, markdown, restructuredtext) is the best choice.

If you write more than you read then just use plain stupid text. It's quicker.

>open a text file made on linux/mac in windows
>it doesn't work
hooooooly shit, is this really true? can windows not open basic ASCII text files?

It doesn't know what to do with non-MS line endings, so anything with a LF newline character appears on a single line.

The strength of text files is that they can be easily spread around and copied, but these days people don't spread files around, but rather just link to them and expect you to read them in the browser. So the "new" text file is the HTML file.

Why the fuck not?

I mean if Windows wants to record newlines as CRLF, thats fine. Good for them. But their default text editor should at least know what to do with a bare LF. The functionality would be really easy to add, and it's not like anybody is using the line feed for anything else

> The functionality would be really easy to add
Yes, but why should Windows make allowances for others?

This only happens on notepad.
Wordpad does the service correctly.

99% of people on Windows will be opening text files with notepad.

I mean it's not preposterous for Microsoft to think that their users might want to open a text file from the only other major family of operating systems that exists, so if they care about their customers why wouldn't th-

nevermind, I figured it out

Well, alternatively, you can use CRLF endings on other systems. CR isn't a printable character anyway. Then your text files are more "portable".

Yes, and microsoft fucked hard on this one.
Probably not as hard as the whole "hide extensions" fiasco, but hard.

>So the "new" text file is the HTML file.
You mean PDF.

DOS/Windows was doing things the "normal" way by using CRLF, because that's what you would originally send to a teletype, one command to reset the carriage and another to feed a line. Unix did things differently by only using a single character.

Of course, that still doesn't excuse how Notepad handles LF in 2018.

Markdown is severely underrated.

- can be read perfectly fine in a text editor
- can be converted to HTML or other markup language for a more graphical view.

Rtf is my favorite format. Has styling but is still minimal. Cross-platform as well.

I use txt often for simply storing information. For example, a list of films I want to download. Or product keys. Its easier than a docx file and you can open it on any device, without needing special software.

Even though those markup languages are pretty cool, I do have a soft spot for files that are meant to be viewed actually as text.

Markdown and its ilk are still meant to be viewed as text, they just also use a set of patterns in the text to make them easier to parse and convert to other formats.

My point is that
title: This is a title


is along way removed from
-----------------
THIS IS

A

T I T L E
-----------------


or whatever.

RST uses something like that for document title:
==================
This is a title
==================
but I know what you mean.

I use them a lot. They're just the quickest way to do things. Until there's a good vi plugin for .doc and .pdf files, it's going to be much more pleasant and quick to edit the file in vim. They also play very well with git. The limitation is, of course, images and linking to other files. Markdown is good if that sort of thing is required. Markdown also makes for a good style-guide even if you're not planning on using a markdown interpreter to display it

Yeah, Windows uses carriage-return + line-feed (0x0d0a) for new lines, Mac and Linux use just a line-feed (0x0a). dos2unix and unix2dox convert between the two with one command.

And don't forget ascii art

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I just liked how much personality was put into things as mundane as a section header. Personality ran up and down these files, and it did it with a simplicity that other formats could never match.

Yes, HTML can have animated gifs, and starfield backgrounds, and all that, but it doesn't have the "from the writer's pen" atmosphere as a text file.

In markdown it's actually:


This is a big title
============

This is a smaller title
---------------------------


I actually find that easier to read than your method.
Remember your title will have text above and below it, so it you alternative between titles and small pieces of text you can't really tell which is the title and which is the normal text.

use [ ] for code tags, not < > here.

obligatory calling you a newfag.

I think linking documents isn't the best of ideas. It makes people lazy, so rather than spend a few paragraphs going over an idea, they just link to another document, but if that document goes down then the part with the link is now useless as well.

no, 99% of people on Windows opening text files will be using MSOffice.

This, I can't be fucking bothered to create a sql database if all I need to do is safe a couple of numbers or strings. It's not really good practice, but nobody can stop me.

I think those are technically "section" titles, rather than the title of the whole document. Depending on which Markdown/tools you're using, maybe a file with no title: metadata will use the top section title instead, but at least pandoc doesn't seem to recognize that as the title:

pandoc -f markdown -t docbook -s
This is a title
===============

Hello world
^D



This is a title

Hello world

It reads that as the title of the first section and leaves the document title empty.

>I actually find that easier to read than your method.
It would only appear right at the start of the document. They can be, and often were, more elaborate.

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Linking documents has its purposes. For example, I use text files for some aspects of documentation in projects I work on. Sometimes, I need to reference a non-text document like an astah file, so I say, See `Diagrams/ProgrammingSocks.astah` or similar. I usually reference documents in the same git repository as the file I'm editing, as well, since documentation should, ideally, be stored with the other documentation. Then, even if the file is moved, renamed, or deleted, it can still be found via git.

I agree that linking to documents can often be lazy and poor practice, though.

Sorry for being unclear. I was talking more about websites and how people link to multiple other sites with no guarantee that link will work. If you link to another site saying 'and as George said', and the link is dead, you have no idea what George said.

Ideally a file should be self-sufficient, or at least linked with a degree of resilience in terms of your own connection, or the server's hosting/existence.

>.txt
You should actually use .asc (for ASCII) or .ucs (for UTF-8 and similar).

fpbp

they're nice
if you just need to throw some information up, they're fantastic

because they already did it
Wordpad has always opened Unix text files correctly.

pretty sure Office doesn't hijack opening .txt