Adding Plaintext Output to Hugo	2022-11-16

I love html and css but sometimes, for one reason or another, I'd rather post
something as 80 columns of ascii text. I also love hugo, its quite possibly the
best thing to happen to me on the web since I learned html in the 2000s, but I
was worried that it wouldn't be able to support plain text output without
modifying the code (which would probably be doable but is definitely
intimidating). For most things I've wanted to do with hugo there's been an easy
to follow tutorial somewhere on the net but unsurprisingly given how weird this
use case is I was unable to find one. Thankfully I eventually found the right
section of hugo's documentation and was able to work it out, so I thought I'd
share it here so that if someone else wants to do this in the future it will be
easier.

The first step of setting up a custom output format is setting up the correct
media type. Luckily, hugo ships with the 'text/plain' media type already set up,
since it's used for robots.txt files. Therefore we can move straight to step 2
and create the output format. I inserted the following entry into config.toml:

[outputformats]
[outputformats.TXT]
mediatype = "text/plain"
isPlainText = true
permalinkable = true
notAlternative = true

Great! we can add a plaintext output to any content file now by adding 'txt' to
the outputs list in the front matter. Buuuut we still need to add templates to
our theme. Hugo makes this easy though, we just need to add a 'baseof.txt' and
a 'single.txt' to layouts/_default. If you need a more complicated template
setup you probably already know the lookup rules well enough that you don't need
the rest of this (in fact, you probably didn't need any of this :P). I added
a really really basic base template. Literally the shortest possible:

{{- block "main" . -}}{{- end -}}

My 'single.txt' template is a little more complicated. I wanted it to mirror my
html post format, with an automatically inserted title, date, license notice and 
links to the next and previous posts:

{{- define "main" -}}
{{ .Title }}	{{ .Lastmod.Format "2006-01-02" }}
{{ .Content }}
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0
International License.
---
{{ with .PrevInSection }}prev:{{ .Permalink }}{{- end -}}
{{ with .NextInSection }}next:{{ .Permalink }}{{ end }}
{{- end -}}

And with that everything should work! One last note, since we don't want
markdown processing (or ANY processing) we need to use .html as the extension
for the files under content, even though this isn't really html. It's hacky and
there may be a way to fix it but I don't know it :P

...wow! you're reading this with the very same plaintext output format I just 
described creating to you :3

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0
International License.
---
prev:https://emm218.neocities.org/posts/machine.html
next:https://emm218.neocities.org/posts/kandi.html