(no subject)

[doyle]

Does anybody know of a good shareware or freeware program that converts text into HTML? Nothing fancy, I just need it to put paragraph breaks in. (This is why my website never gets updated, because I hate coding.)

ETA: and while I'm asking questions, a fic one. The character Jonathan Woodward played in Firefly - is his name spelled Tracy or Tracey? Google brings up pretty even numbers of matches for both.

Comments

[doyle_sb4.livejournal.com]

A stupid question: what do you search and replace? Is there a way of replacing a blank line with [p]?

[indri]

*goes to check on her emacs window because my fingers remember this better than my brain*

Assuming that you have Emacs and standard key-bindings,

META-% for search-replace
CNTRL-Q for special character
CNTRL-J the special character is a carriage return
CNTRL-Q CNTRL-J again because you're probably denoting paragraphs by separating them with a blank line
RETURN to end search string
CNTRL-Q CNTRL-J CNTRL-Q CNTRL-J [p]
RETURN to end replace string

Uh, does that help? I only mentioned Emacs because that's the text editor used by the physicists and mathematicians I know. Like me, for example :)

[doyle_sb4.livejournal.com]

*g* I don't have emacs but I'll look into finding it. Thank you!

[indri]

I don't have emacs but I'll look into finding it.

Then using emacs for this would be like going nuclear on a bug. I've used it for a dozen years and much of it is still vast, uncharted depth to me. It's about as user-friendly as learning Unix or Linux from scratch, with different modes for different programming languages, shell scripts, LaTeX, html etc. It's not small or compact but it's pretty damn near all-encompassing. You might want to look at it anyway, but not for this. It's part of the Gnu open-source project: try gnu.org, emacs.org or xemacs.org.

[ludditerobot.livejournal.com]

I know people who swear by emacs, but most of my friends are vi bigots who swear at emacs. Eighty Megs And Constantly Swapping, Escape-Meta-Alt-Control-Shift, etc. I'm sure you've heard it all before.

[indri]

I never became fluent with vi, so I tend to use it only as a last resort, whereas I use emacs for eveything from writing fiction to writing code. The serious coders I know in Adelaide and Austin all use emacs, so I've been sheltered from the emacs/vi religious wars. Frankly, we were all too busy hugging our Linux boxes tight and fending off Microsoft Windows users.

[ludditerobot.livejournal.com]

I'm with you there. I suppose there is a tendency for these religious things to come in groups. I'm fairly sure that vi is what was taught in the first labs I took as a CS programmer. One of my friends, a guy who works in engineering computing for the local U, is a big emacs backer and has it do all sorts of things. To my mind, emacs has become his windowing system, but it works for him, so I don't say anything.

And yes, there are far more important things to do than argue vi vs. emacs. If you can make it work for you, more power to you. But everything you need to know to make vi work can fit on the side of a coffee cup.

[indri]

I was originally taught an editor called ludwig, a vi knock-off developed by one of the university staff. When we switched to vi proper, I found the comparison confusing. That's when some friends suggested I switch to emacs, which I found more intuitive for some reason. In principle, I prefer small, light codes but emacs seems to be the exception.

[violethamster.livejournal.com]

You may as well use Notepad. Emacs doesn't convert text into HTML. I use Emacs to write programs, and it's not fun.

If I'm in a rush I sometimes use the 'save as webpage' option in Word. But the code it produces is inefficient and doesn't always work.

[indri]

Emacs can be fun. It might help if you're me, though. I use it for for everything, including html conversion but I hand-code by choice because I want to know what the innards look like and dislike WYSIWYG.