macOS Not markup but merely plain text formatting

[TheGenerous]

Some plain text files include certain formatting to indicate boxes, tables, titles, subtitles and maybe more things. It's not markup language but a way to make text files more readable.

What words can I use to look for this on the internet?

This is an example;

=============================================================================
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        DisplayLink macOS Software Release Note

Version: 4.0.0 (85514)
Date: 19th September 2017

DisplayLink DL-3xx0 / DL-5xx0 Firmware Version: 9.3.55.88162
DisplayLink DL-41xx Firmware Version: 9.3.55.88161
DisplayLink DL-6xxx Firmware Version: 9.3.55.88162
=============================================================================
=============================================================================


A. Introduction
===============

This is DisplayLink macOS Software v4.0.0.

This release delivers the following improvements
 * Compatibility with macOS High Sierra 10.13
   * Hardware acceleration on macOS 10.13 (on Metal compatible systems)
   * Increased video performance on macOS 10.13 (on Metal compatible systems)
   * Bug fixes

 

[Senor Cuete]

Only a file architecture that uses metadata can display formatting such as bold, italic, etc. This is also true of table formatting, boxes, etc. I don't think that there is a way to include these things in a plain text file.

The closest thing I know about like that would be to use a mono-spaced font (one where all of the characters have the same width). Then you can create tables where the characters line up in columns.

There are very many different markup languages.

 

[Mikael H]

Some plain text files include certain formatting to indicate boxes, tables, titles, subtitles and maybe more things. It's not markup language but a way to make text files more readable.

What words can I use to look for this on the internet?

It's plaintext, or nicely laid-out ASCII.
A table can be created by creative usage of pluses, dashes, and pipe signs. If your editor (and your viewers!) can parse the full ASCII table, it's even possible to create kind of nice-looking boxes with drop-shadows like it was 1987.

 

[Toutou]

I don't think there is a dedicated word for this. It's just nicely formatted plaintext

 

[MC6800]

You could try searching for "coding style guide" (or "X style guide" for language X) and look at for example the box-comments section.

 

[jdechko]

If you want a couple of options, check out Markdown (more geared to HTML) or MultiMarkdown (more geared to printed writing)

 

[TheGenerous]

If you want a couple of options, check out Markdown (more geared to HTML) or MultiMarkdown (more geared to printed writing)

Thank you, MMD isn't what I was asking but plain text written nicely like in .nfo or readme files. Thanks jdechko for bringing MMD to the conversation. For those of you who don't know about MultiMarkDown there are plenty of good examples on the internet of these convenient portable files. For the Mac you will need Pandoc to convert your files to HTML, PDF, LaTeX among other popular formats. I've written a few unix shell files to use Pandoc for recurrent actions within folders instead of typing each in the Terminal.