discuss: Plain text documents
Subject:
Re: Plain text documents
From:
David Lawyer ####@####.####
Date:
10 Feb 2016 07:42:43 +0000
Message-Id: <20160210074203.GB18353@daveslinux>
> > On Tue, Feb 09, 2016 at 01:35:43AM -0800, David Lawyer wrote:
> >The simplest idea would jest be to keep it a .txt file and not convert it to
> >linuxdoc. The problem with the above proposal is that it doesn't support
> >lists or tables
>
On Tue, Feb 09, 2016 at 02:28:18PM -0500, Roger wrote:
> Ditto. Keep it simple, or adhere to standards first.
>
> Publish a simple ascii/txt file.
>
> What I usually see done is an HTML file converted backwards to a simple markup
> text. Headings and sub-headings can be easily found within HTML files versus
> text only files. So running a script on an HTML file to back-port the file to
> text only, but with simple mark-up headings for table of contents. Similar to
> what Amazon's Kindlegen performs when converting HTML to Mobi/PRC files, albeit
> proprietary. I would think something similar can be easily performed within
> Linux (and likely already can be performed) using a simple script (ie.
> AWK/GAWK) for converting HTML to a simplified text only with some markup
> commands.
Both linuxdoc and docbook can output plain text files and Linux has
programs to convert html to text. Also, most browsers can do this too.
But for LDP, we're talking about cases where the author writes in plain
text. Does any smart converter exist for converting that to html. It
would need to detect lists, tables, table of contents etc. all of which
may be in various styles in a text document and convert them to html, etc.
Does such software exist? Well, there's txt2html which claims it can
convert lists and most tables. It seems that it actually requires a
little markup since an example shows underlined headings in the text doc.
to be converted. Perhaps I'll try it out on one of my txt docs.
David Lawyer
