User dbucklin has an interesting introduction to troff and a
justification for its use as a formatting tool for gopher
content[1]. The amount of thought and study that went into
writing even the phlog post about it makes me ashamed to
admit that I just type in lines and press enter when things
get to around 60 characters. I'm exceptionally lazy with my
gopher formatting.
There are some phlogs out there that just have oustanding
formatting. They have justified paragraphs that look nice
and are easy to read. Some have ascii art. It appears that
people put some thought and effort into the process, and
that is wonderful. I've wanted to do a bit better, but I've
been lazy about it.
I'll have to cut a corner off my geek card for admitting it,
but I like to use nano to type my posts. Sure, I can use
other editors, and I have used a wide variety of editors on
a wide variety of systems, but I just like editors of this
kind- ones that don't force me to memorize things. It makes
me happy. If I'm feeling really saucy, I'll use 'mousepad'
in X, which provides for a nice background color change at a
user-definable width; and when I'm done I'll paste my text
into a terminal.
And yet, I'm not entirely pleased with the workflow. I tried
"par" out, which was suggested in some old gopher post that
I can't recall right now, and I liked it, but I haven't done
it since. I'm going to try it now on this document- which
I'm typed with soft-wrapping on in nano, and without
entering my manual line breaks- and I'll see how that goes.
It would be "something."
[1]
gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/dbucklin/posts/gopher_groff.txt
