Re: NEWS file format

Bruno Haible <[email protected]> Thu, 11 Jan 2018 23:02:02 +0100
Newsgroups gmane.lisp.clisp.devel
Message-ID <4769556.McVrN9W5Bf@omega>
Hi Sam,

> CLISP NEWS file is fairly long (almost 5k lines).

People usually will want to ignore the news from 2010 and before.
So, that makes only ca. 200 lines to read.

> It has "free text" format.
> I want to convert it to the outline format
> (https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Outline-Format.html)
> which will allow for an easier navigation in Emacs and VIM.

Please not! I object!

Rationale:

1) This outline format is ill-conceived for reading without special tool
   support. Namely, the subsubsections stand out brighter than the sections.
   (The subsubsections have 3 asterisks, vs. 1 asterisk for the sections.)
   This is just the opposite of what it ought to be. Section titles should
   stand out more heavily than subsubsections.

2) What Emacs and vim do with these files, does not matter. The user will
   want to view the NEWS file, not edit it. The common tool for viewing a
   text file is the browser ("firefox /usr/share/doc/clisp/NEWS") or, in
   a terminal emulator, the 'less' program. Neither the browser nor the
   'less' program have special support for the outline format. (I just
   verified this, on emacs/NEWS.)

Bruno


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