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JOURNAL FOR THURSDAY 23RD APRIL, 2015
______________________________________________________________________________
SUBJECT: Goodbye to Justify Text
DATE: Thu 23 Apr 21:09:16 BST 2015
Second attempt at writing this entry. It was supposed to be for Monday, then
moved to Tuesday and rewritten. Maybe it will make it out of the editor for
Wednesday? *sigh* and now it's Thursday...
I decided a while ago to retire one of my websites - justifyingtext.info - a
shame, but necessary. It hadn't been updated or worked on for ages and I
simply do not have the spare time. Justifying Text was where the style of this
site, and the tools behind it originated; developed by myself but inspired by
Gopher[1]. The site was all about text: ASCII, Unicode, plain text, formatted
text, text processing and text tools. Even when using plain text there can be
issues: line endings[2], tab sizes[3], fonts used. When using Unicode the
choice of font and it's codepoint coverage is especially difficult due to
missing glyphs.
I have always considered simple, plain text to be one of the most important
data formats - one that seems to be lost in the plethora of formats now
available. Part of the Unix philosophy is:
Write programs to handle text streams,
because that is a universal interface.
Most people think plain text is... just simple plain text and wonder how you
would do anything with it! By contrast plain text can be really powerful. I
can feed plain text through spell checkers, grammar checkers, sorters,
filters, formatters, typesetters and many, many other tools. I can convert it
to Word documents, HTML, Postscript, PDF files and hundreds of others. I can
just view and edit the text, send it to anyone on any platform and they can
view it and edit it as well - no special software required.
Text files are also tiny compared to PDF, Word documents, etc. Slow network
link? Cloud storage costing $$$ per byte? Local storage has limited space? Try
using text files where you can! Do you really need the shopping list on your
smartphone in multiple colours with multiple fonts in multiple styles? Really?
As an added bonus plain text files usually compress really well to make them
smaller still.
You don't even need a fancy screen[4] and fancy hardware to use plain text -
old systems and old screens work well and people will often just give you old
hardware so they don't have to pay to have it properly disposed of ;)
I have plain text files that are thirty years or more old. I can still read
and edit them. I have files in other formats that are now inaccessible without
a considerable amount of time and effort. What files will I no longer be able
to a access in another decade or two?
As you have probably gathered, I lo♥e plain text :)
In other news: I have the hardware sorted out for the replacement server[5] I
am so desperately in need of. I've loaded and configured most of the system.
Just need to yank the second network card out of the current server and drop
it into it's new home. Then some miscellaneous configuration, a final data
sync and it should be good to go. Although it is making an odd 'tick' noise -
sounds like a tiny bit of grit in one of the fans being tumbled around. Tried
an air compressor on it to evict all the dust bunnies from inside, including
the fans - it's a donated second hand system :) - but to no avail :(
It's running and everything else seems fine...
--
Diddymus
[1] For Gopher see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_protocol
[2] Common line endings are CR (Early Mac OS), LF (Unix) or CR+LF (Windows).
Also LF+CR and RS (ASCII 30 - 0x1E, record separator) and others.
[3] The defacto standard is a width of 8 spaces. For vertical tabs the
defacto standard is 6 lines ;)
[4] You don't even need a screen if you have a machine with sound
capabilities and text to speech software...
[5] Intel Celeron E1400, dual core @ 2Ghz, 2Ggb DDR2
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