Re: How to use vim to write a aligned plain text (txt) file as the vim help files?

On Sat, Sep 22, 2018 at 12:02:51PM -0700, Hausen Schaff wrote:
> vim help files are in plain text format. They'are under /vim/vim80/doc.Lots of <Tab> characters are used to align the contents.
>
> Interestingly, I can't find a good way to write such <Tab> aligned texts by vim. Every plugin use space to align words. Some bring this issue up on these project homes, and no solution is provided.
>
> I'm curious how the vim developers write the help documents?

I didn't look at the documentation and help files in detail, but they
have a relatively narrow width, not too many columns width. also they
have a fixed format, linu by line.

to reproduce this you could easily use tabs or spaces to align text.
when you also use a narrow width for your document, there will be no
need for the text to rearrange itself over the full width of your screen
or window, text is formatted line by line through a sentence.

> Plugins

IMHO vim is perfect the way it is and I'm not using any plugins for this
kind of regular tasks --- that besides the fun of learning vim's
capabilities.

for the rest I mainly use vim to make text with basic markdown that I
process with pandoc to make nice pdf's, and pandoc does the clean
outlining of markedup text.

my solution would be to set the right tabwith or tabstops at the needed
position of the rightmost column in vim and/or use spaces
to make a column layout. find out how to automate with basic vim, best
is to make your document and do the formatting afterwards (vim-way:
separating writing and editing)

when you want to make such files to publish as pdf or whatever
environment, just use basic
[markdown](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/) as a markup
language and use pandoc to convert it to your needed environment.
markdown has some great ways to produce a good layout.

in vim I use markdown to make nice aligned lists with

* text after the bullet goes here

text in a separate paragraph that belongs to the bullet above is
indended in vim with '>>'

//meine

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