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Using par with Ed

Previous I wrote about using par with vim or with vi. In both editors, par can be used as formatter, that will give eye-pleasing paragraphs.

I try to make my gopher pages pretty with par. In order to maintain some muscle-memory, I also try to use Ed from time to time. This article is written with Ed :)

Using Ed to write the article

When using Ed to write texts, par has to be used as an external formatter. To make life a little easier, I wrote a small shell script that will run the text through par. It also puts the line below the top line to make it stand out a bit as title, and it puts the two RCS keywords, Date and Id, at the top resp. bottom of the text.

For these last two steps I use a silly awk-script that will do the job fine.

The gophermap with all the articles in it, is generated from a RCS repository. This will help to get all the "last edited at"-dates right, and put the articles in chronological order in the gophermap.

So, the script that turns a small text written in Ed into a article with par, ends with a ci, to put the text in the RCS repo.

To make future edits easier, the original file is saved to, so it can be edited again with Ed.

The next steps could be to add spellchecking and perhaps a Makefile. For now, I am happy with the script :)

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⇽ Having fun using the ED editor Lynx without cookies ⇾