|
Plaintext, as in text, won't get seriously mangled. Text with symbols, which I admit should fit in the general idea of a "plaintext file", will be interpreted potentially in ways not intended in a regular text edited document. Italicized, bold, and underlined HTML text does pretty much resemble the purposes for which those symbols (asterisks, underscores) are used in text. Even bulleted lists and numbered lists are handled in a pretty straightforward fashion. Where you see problems is when you're putting in footnote notations, equations, source code, and such. There are ways in both HTML and markdown to keep pre-formatted text for those cases. What the author has accomplished is not having a special notation for those, but also reinventing Pic, Fig, DOT, or SVG for simple images. It's done by requiring a game engine rather than using any of those prexisting tools. Pic and Eqn are literally from the 1980s and 1970s, respectively. Pikchr (a Pic enhancement) is designed to be embeddable into markdown rather than troff, and could pretty easily embed into plaintext-with-template-tags like this. DPic is Pic-compatible and can produce Postscript, PDF, SVG, or image formats. As a bonus to the author of lines.love Pic-compatible tools already can take nested expressions in a slightly different format, and can also produce programmatically-defined shapes. https://ece.uwaterloo.ca/~aplevich/dpic/
https://ece.uwaterloo.ca/~aplevich/dpic/dpic-doc.pdf |