itxt

Minimalist plain text formatter, supporting HTML and groff

ITXT is intended for long term storage of notes where plain text is the master
format, but it should be easy to produce something “nicer looking” for easy
information sharing. There are no dependencies to the implementation to make
long term maintenance less cumbersome. For the same reason, the feature set is
very minimal: Re-flow of text within an indented paragraph, forced line breaks,
and switching to a pre-formatted (non-proportional font, no squashing of space
characters) environment.

Indent is by default a multiple of four spaces, tabs are not allowed.

Line break is forced by ending a line with “_|”.

Switching to and from monospace font is done by a single line containing only 80
consecutive “-” characters.

reStructuredText is a superior, but for good and bad, also a richer format. RST
is designed for making a good looking end product, this is more or less
impossible with ITXT. ITXT is strictly minimalist and aims for the writer not
spending any time on the feature set, or details of a host system being exposed
during conversion to any of the output format.


    1.0 itxt2html

Converts ITXT data from stdin to HTML on stdout. Run with “-h” for a synopsis.

This is the oldest of the, at the time of writing, three converters, and the
rest are pretty much based on this.


    2.0 itxt2groff

Converts ITXT data from stdin to groff on stdout. Run with “-h” for a synopsis.

Only tested with groff, neither nroff nor troff. The generator might be
interesting for somebody who wants to write a groff pre-processor.


    3.0 itxt2txt

Converts ITXT data from stdin to plain text on stdout. Run with “-h” for a
synopsis.

It might seem strange to convert a plain text format to a plain text format, but
this utility reflows the paragraphs in the input file and removes dangling line
break markers (“_|”) while honoring them. Intended for reading a file on very
narrow terminals or windows.


    4.0 Licence

Copyright 2019-2021 Steinar Knutsen

Licensed under the EUPL, Version 1.2 or – as soon they will be approved by the
European Commission – subsequent versions of the EUPL (the “Licence”); You may
not use this work except in compliance with the Licence. You may obtain a copy
of the Licence at:

https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/eupl-text-eupl-12

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed
under the Licence is distributed on an “AS IS” basis, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR
CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the Licence for the
specific language governing permissions and limitations under the Licence.