_  _ ____ __ _ _  _ ____ ____ ____ ___ _  _ ____ _ __ _ ____
 |\/| |--| | \| |__| |--- |--| |___  |  |__| |--< | | \| |__,
 ____ ____ __ _ ____ ____ ____ __ _
 |___ [__] | \| |___ |=== |--< | \|

Writing Style

I want to look good on here when I do more formal⁰ writing. Gemini, and gemtext specifically, is intentionally limited in what you can do. I don't have an fancy HTML tags I can play with here; just plain text. But, we have the entire unicode table to work with here. So that should give me room to truly work out something that looks good.

This page was inspired by Alex's (nytpu) post about formatting gemtext documents. Though I have some issues with their choice of formatting (as we'll get to), it did get me to think about how I want to have my pages look.

It should be noted that this is a work–in–progress and I will most likely add sections when I see fit. My last edit for this page was on 09 September, 2025.

Em/En Dashes

Use these! We have unicode now, so you can input a raw em dash (—) and an en dash (–). Just use some settings in your text editor to put them in easier. These are all different from your standard hyphen (-). How they differ will be left as an exercise for the reader—that's you!

Text after ```

Any text following the leading "```" of a preformat toggle line MAY be interpreted by the client as "alt text" pertaining to the preformatted text lines which follow the toggle line.

The spec does allow some use for alt-text. I'm going to reserve this for ASCII art descriptions only. The jury is out on using this for syntax highlighting. One one hand I have to agree with Rob Pike in calling it "juvenile," but I can also see the benefit of using at least a little bit of it. I'll reserve this rant for another time.

UPDATE: That last point was too snarky. I'm still a syntax coloring hater but I think I'll take advantage of alt–text for those that use it.

Links and Footnotes

There is a current trend to use footnote-style annotations when referencing links to others' works.

I really liked Solderpunk's article[1] on how to blend tomatoes and deodorant to exfoliate the skin.

<snip>

While this certainly gets the job done, are a few issues I have with it. First off, what happens when you want to mix a footnote in with a link?

I really liked Solderpunk's article[1] on how to blend tomatoes and deodorant to exfoliate the skin. I personally was trying oranges and anti-perspirant[2] but I'll have to give this a try!

<snip>

[2] Specifically, you need Degree 48H anti-perspirant. And yes, there's a difference between that and deodorant.

This may not bother other people, but the main issue I have here is the mixing up of footnotes and sources. It looks nasty to me on its own. As well I have to account for people who use terminal gemini browsers¹. A common theme I see on some of those browsers is the use of the "bracket–number–bracket" notation to let users navigate to certain links. With that in mind, take a look at how bombadillo renders the second example:

      
      I really liked Solderpunk's article[1] on how to blend tomatoes and 
      deodorant to exfoliate the skin.  I personally was trying oranges and 
      anti-perspirant[2] but I'll have to give this a try!

      

[2]   [1] Solderpunk's article
      [2] Specifically, you need Degree 48H anti-perspirant.  And yes, there's a
      difference between that and deodorant.
      

Two brackets on one line? AND the numbers are out of sync?? Gross. I'll have none of this on my site.

So how do we fix this? By typing out footnotes and links differently.

Footnote Solution

We have the entire unicode table to work with. Look at this!

⁰¹²³⁴⁵⁶⁷⁸⁹

Look at those lil guys!! You'll notice I've been using them through out this article. I was originally going to go with hexadecimal footnotes because that tickles my programming brain, but the superscript letters don't look good in the font I currently use. :( Ten digits should be plenty.

Link Solution

Call me a nerd, but I actually like the way academics cite their sources. If you write the article just right, you won't have to even put a tag in the middle of your sentence².

I really liked Solderpunk's article on how to blend tomatoes and deodorant to exfoliate the skin.

<snip>

Sources

And if I'm citing one person multiple times, we can either make specific reference to which citation in text, or just put it in parentheses.

I really liked Solderpunk's article (Solderpunk, 2042) ... <snip>

Potential Cons

Right now, the only negative I can see with my approach is the amount of manual work on my end to make sure my sources are right. In typing this, I already had to move around my footnotes because I put one in–between the two I had. However, I'm already planning on having LibreOffice export my documents to gemtext³. It can handle citation management and footnotes. All I'd have to do is figure out how to export those documents to gemtext.

Footnotes

• ⁰Despite how seriously I'm taking myself in here, please don't think I'll have a stick up my ass the whole time. I am a goofy individual.

• ¹Even if we live in the year of our Lord 20XX and have computers that can easily handle variable–width fonts easily. I could go on a rant about how command–line interfaces should be left for specific use cases and how, when done right, the mouse is actually superior to the keyboard for navigation. Perhaps I'll discuss this at length later; the footnote of an article isn't the place for this.

• ²If I am wrong about this I will change this specific part. Citing sources is important even in more casual contexts.

• ³I'd only use this for the beefy articles I think I'll write in the future. Simple documents can be done in any text editor.

Sources

▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚
▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚▚