Ia writer first line indent5/27/2023 txt.Ĭhanging the extension of any note on this website from. On my computer, I name the files with the. : "Diomidis Spinellis's guide to writing LaTeX effectively for collaboration and research."Īll of the content on this website is stored as Markdown and converted to HTML the details are explained in the Colophon. ![]() These sentences are separated by linebreaks. It happens to use that I was first exposed to in a. Wherever I can, I try to include a description of the link, which is added to the title of the anchor and can be read by screen readers. I prefer to use the link text as the reference ID, if possible, so there’s less metadata in the prose, but if the link isn’t a proper noun, I’ll shorten the reference to a hyphenated phrase. When writing a typical document, I’ll make references out of the URLs and keep all of the definitions at the bottom of the document, sorted so it’s easier to find a reference by its ID. I use a combination of reference and inline links, depending on the context.įor lists and ephemeral-feeling links, I use inline links with the URL next to the link, like (url). It also doesn’t really make sense for a single-sentence list item. It looks a bit strange, with subsequent sentences not aligned with the first, and I could potentially break just after the hyphen, like this: -īut that syntax doesn’t parse as a list item unless there’s a trailing space on the hyphen. I stopped doing that when it became too cumbersome to use with my editor, and now leave them unindented. Using semantic linefeeds in the first paragraph of a list item is challenging because it’s not clear how to indent subsequent sentences.įor a while, I was indenting them by two spaces to be aligned with the first sentence. This echoes some of Diomidis Spinellis’s Advice for writing LaTeX documents, specifically on how to Write readable and maintainable LaTeX source code and Derek Sivers’s recommendation on writing one sentence per line. Sentences seem like a good compromise between vertical and horizonal space usage. I don’t go as far as breaking lines on fragments or lists, but I may try that in the future. This technique is similar to how roff is typically formatted and is called semantic line breaks, semantic linefeeds, or, archaically, ventilated prose. This also saves me from needing an editor that supports reflowing text and remembering to reflow it when editing an existing paragraph and gives a strong hint to tools about where sentence breaks are vs. This allows version control systems to track changes on a per-sentence basis, as opposed to per-80 columns or per-paragraph. Instead of reflowing text to fit in a certain column limit or allowing text to be reflowed entirely by the editor with “soft wrapping,” I add a line break after each sentence. Over the years I’ve written in Markdown, I’ve developed some habits and best practices for keeping it maintainable and clear. Unlike a WYSIWYG editor like Word or Pages, I’m not bothered by the font or paragraph spacing, and can defer those decisions to later. It lets me use whichever text editor is most convenient (usually iA Writer) and then prepare it for publication using other, more specialized tools. Markdown keeps me from getting distracted by typefaces, font sizes, and margins, while still giving me tools to embed links, code, and emphasis. Markdown is a way to style plain text documents without needing to edit them with a word processor like Microsoft Word. ![]() Ironically, some newer “flavors” of Markdown deliberately break this behavior, to the point where many people don’t realize that it goes directly against one of the key feature/behaviors that Gruber intentionally chose.Using Markdown effectively Matt Widmann Notes Now Using Markdown effectively Markdown’s email-style blockquoting and multi-paragraph list items work best - and look better - when you format them with hard breaks. Yes, this takes a tad more effort to create a, but a simplistic “every line break is a ” rule wouldn’t work for Markdown. When you do want to insert a break tag using Markdown, you end a line with two or more spaces, then type return. This differs significantly from most other text-to-HTML formatters (including Movable Type’s “Convert Line Breaks” option) which translate every line break character in a paragraph into a tag. The implication of the “one or more consecutive lines of text” rule is that Markdown supports “hard-wrapped” text paragraphs. (A blank line is any line that looks like a blank line - a line containing nothing but spaces or tabs is considered blank.) Normal paragraphs should not be indented with spaces or tabs. Quoting Gruber’s original Markdown description:Ī paragraph is simply one or more consecutive lines of text, separated by one or more blank lines. I think this was a strange choice for markdown.
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