Re: ASCII formatting for plain text email

[songbird <songbird@anthive.com>]

Pierre Willaime wrote:
...
> I would like to format plain text emails to increase readability and
> information separation. The idea is to go beyond markdown and to have
> more visible elements. For example I am looking for a convenient way to
> "draw" some ASCII boxes such as
>
> #####################
> ## some title here ##
> #####################

  ... uhg!  please don't!  there are tools that will do whatever
picture drawing you like, but ascii docs alone should be as
simple as possible.  if you want more formatted stuff there are
all sorts of things like groff, nroff, TeX (latex, texlive-latex),
mathjax, etc.

  it is bad enough that people post stuff and then include all
the rest of the message below (otherwise known as top posting)
as i sure don't need to see unformatted html in a text group.

  for your own use in your own documents i don't care what you
do but once you post to usenet there are some general conventions
that are reasonable.


  songbird  (not having long .sigs is one of them... (4 lines max)
               but if you've done it properly i won't see them
                     at all...  :)  <-- smiley may or may not be
                                                 a close paren