Re: ASCII formatting for plain text email

[Anton Shepelev <anton.txt@gmail.com>]

,----[Pierre Willaime:]
| I  would  like  to format plain text emails to in-
| crease readability and information separation. The
| idea  is  to  go  beyond markdown and to have more
| visible elements.
`------------------

Markdown is intended for conversion  into  HTML  and
other  formats (see Pandoc), while remaining a read-
able plain-text  file,  which  is  compromise.   You
don't need this compromise if the ASCII is your only
intended output.

My own quest for the formatting of ASCII files ended
up  in GNU Troff, which can do all the standard ele-
ments of sturcutured documents, such as:

  1.  Basic formatting, such as paragraphs,  hyphen-
      ation, justification
  2.  Lists:  bulleted,  dashed,  automatically num-
      bered.
  3.  Footnotes[1]
  4.  Sections and subsection.
  5.  Tables.
  6.  Wrapping of text around rectangular areas.

For a small demo to  begin  with,  see  the  CoreOps
newsletter, which I typeset with GNU Troff:

   http://inversed.ru/CoreWar/CoreOps_02.txt

I  have  typeset  this  e-mail in GNU Troff, so make
sure to view it in a monospace font.
____________________
1. Yes, indeed.