Nothing plain about plain text!

2020 05 14

I love this plain text business. It gets down to the basic level of information needed to convey an idea, over a carrier service, between two or more people.

But plain text is boring, right? That's one reason why HTML was such a runaway success ... it brought us headings and lists and then OMG images, and then this bell and that whistle and before long you have this behemoth on your hands, or what most people today would consider to be "The Internet".

I think this was the gist of the discussion on the Gemini mailing lists recently where a proposal was made to include markdown in the protocol spec. This was countered with the suggestion that if you open the door to markdown and similar formatting rules then you might as well use HTML.

One the one hand I can see the appeal of markdown because truly plain text IS quite boring to look at, especially when there are large blocks of text (like when I get carried away on a rant). However, I also really like the purity of sticking to plain text and I really admire people who can respond creatively to the tension generating by wanting to get more from a limited medium.

I EXPECT YOU READ THIS SENTENCE IN A LOUD VOICE. And you *probably* also put the emphasis on the third word of this sentence. Plus there is a lot more you can do with just the characters you have available. By way of example, I strongly urge you to visit 'stoned.txt' by brool over at tilde.black:

Gemini mirror of ~brool's gopher phlog

It's all 'plain text' but none of it is boring. I also really like the two column format with dropped capitals ... it looks great! I might see if I can throw together a script to format text in that way because I imagine that doing it manually would have taken a lot of time!

People have been jazzing up plain text for decades, starting with ASCII Art. Originally, ASCII Art was limited to using the 95 printable characters found in the 7-bit ASCII set. Then more characters appeared with 8-bit extended ASCII and the artists responded. See what the folks are getting up to over at ASCII Town; it's hardly boring over there either!

ASCII Town

Large letters were made in exciting new fonts using the techniques of ASCII Art and became known as 'figlets'. The basic character sets expanded and diversified to include more languages and symbols and today we find ourselves with the rich, wide-open plains of UTF-8 Unicode ... which _is_ part of the Gemini specification!

So, without any extra work Gemini already supports 𝘈𝘭𝘭 𝖐𝖎𝖓𝖉𝖘 𝕠𝕗 𝗳𝘂𝗻 🅤🅝🅘🅒🅞🅓🅔 𝓯𝓸𝓷𝓽𝓼 just by the strategic use of existing UTF-8 letterlike characters. Most standard fonts shipped with modern operating systems will be able to render these characters; if you don't see "all kinds of fun unicode fonts" in the example there then you ought to consider changing to a font with better support!

As with ASCII Art and Figlets, these new characters can be exploited. Here is this server's name in 'Melting' font, from TextFancy:

TextFancy Multiline ASCII Art Generator

The problem with deviating from basic plain text is that accessibility drops off so anyone using a screenreader will miss out. Without markup to include 'hidden' alt-text the best solution is for the content creator to make sure any fancy text is redundant, with the information available somewhere else in the work.

Anyway, I think there's a lot of potential to create engaging content on Gemini drawing only from the well of plain text Unicode characters. So ...

Check out more information and inspiration at roysac.com

Addendum: Here's a sneak preview of the output of my Python Glog Formatter for a fixed-width preformatted magazine style output:

Input TXT

Output GMI

If you are interested in trying it out, you can download it here:

textMunger: convert text to Gemini and HTML

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