 *Minimum Profit: the mptxt format* 

 Ángel Ortega <angel@triptico.com> 

The mptxt format is a very lightweight text formatting markup that can be converted by the Minimum Profit text editor to other text formats. This document describes version 1.00 of the mptxt format.

Output formats supported as of Minimum Profit 5.32 are rtf, troff and html.

Default paragraphs are delimited by blank lines; line breaks can be used arbitrarily and treated the same as spaces. On output they follow the de-facto Spanish literary convention: first line is indented unless it's the first paragraph of the text or if it follows a special section, like centered text or a section break.

Paragraphs with a leading space are treated as _verbatim_ text; in this kind of text, line breaks are meaningful and no justification is done. This is an example:

 From: Ángel Ortega <angel@triptico.com>
 To: <biohazard laboratory staff>
 Subject: Release the virus
  
 This is an example email.
     Line breaks are shown as written.

These kind of paragraphs will be shown in a monospaced font if the output format makes it possible. In the example above, the line between the subject and the body has *two* spaces: one to mark it as a paragraph to be centered and another one to include some content, as leading spaces are deleted on output. Otherwise, they will be treated as two different paragraphs.

If a paragraph is made of lines with a leading space *and* a trailing space, it's treated as text that must be shown centered. This is an example:

 INTERREGNO EVIL CORPORATION 
 NO ENTRY 
 TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT ON SIGHT 

Or to introduce a section separator, like this:

 *** 

If the output format supports it somehow, URLs shall be made clickable, as when writing one like https://triptico.com or similar.

Text that must be shown emphasized can be surrounded by underscores, like in _this example_. As well, strong text can be surrounded by asterisks, like in *this very attention-demanding text*.

Unicode is accepted wherever possible; some output formats have encoding limitations, though, so be reasonable. As it's important for Spanish writing, special treatment for m-dashes (—) is included. Also, if a form feed character (ASCII 0C HEX) is found, a page break is inserted according to the target format.

A set of more than one empty lines are respected as empty lines, as following:



Some output formatting can be tweaked via configuration variables, see mp.config for details.
