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Anyone have any tips for ASCII formatting?

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Paul Keith:
I don't really know any ASCII formatting (like the ones you see in Gamefaqs) so I've been making liberal use of the =, -, [,] symbols.

Any other advice like text editor and symbols. (For ex. I have no idea how to make a decent Table of Contents yet.)

It's just nowadays I've been relying on DropBox's free 2gb for back ups and .txt is the lightest, most convenient cross-OS format I know of.

I've even resorted to typing up webpages instead of using web clippers.

I'm just angry that when a program dies down (or in my case because I switched to Linux), it's a hell of a lot of work extracting those notes because exports only work on the same program.

Then I hate that I'm connected to one/couple of external HDs so I decided I might just as well squeeze all 2gb with text files. At least it's easier to recover compared to HDs and sticks.

housetier:
There are several markup languages that use ascii input to generate various outputs: markdown, asciidoc, textile. However, none of these generate a TOC in the ascii document itself. They are just markup languages like html or that dreaded [[wiki markup]] and need further processing to look pretty.

I wonder if an outliner thingie like The Vim Outliner (TVO) can help you organize things. Although it seems the site is a little old. According to the snippet on google result, TVO has automatic generation of TOC. But you need to know your way around vim for TVO to be useful.

I'll ask a friend for a solution with emacs; it seems to me emacs would be able to do this sort of ascii-based word processing.

housetier:
The friend has responded and suggested to use org-mode and muse with emacs.

He further suggests to look into the emacs wiki.

Hope it helps! :)

Paul Keith:
Thanks but I knew about org mode already.

I was hoping for something that doesn't tie me in to commands on a single text editor and also from what I've seen of it (I haven't actually tried it), it's more of a simplification on the emacs command to produce an equivalent to-do list/outliner for emacs instead of switching to another program. (In that sense, it's more to keep it all in one program than to provide a separate product with it's own unique features)

Muse sounds interesting though. I'll look into it when I can finally understand how to use emacs.

housetier:
Would a seperate program work, that parses your text file and inserts the generated TOC at a specified location in the file? You know, like a really simple template engine>

                                  Paul's Notes

{{{TOC}}}

Entry 1
    Dear diary and so forth

    blah

Entry 2
    and then...


--- End quote ---

would become

                                  Paul's Notes
{{{TOC}}}
    Table of Contents
        Entry 1
        Entry 2
{{{/TOC}}}

Entry 1
    Dear diary and so forth

    blah

Entry 2
    and then...


--- End quote ---

Such a parser should be easy to program, but would need to be run after adding or removing entries.

Does the TOC have to be inserted in-place in the same file or is it acceptable to generate an output file --which is not supposed to be edited but only read-- from the original file?

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