Skip to content

message-formatting.md

Latest commit

 

History

History
67 lines (49 loc) · 3.19 KB

message-formatting.md

File metadata and controls

67 lines (49 loc) · 3.19 KB
Raw

Message Formatting (Multi-Channel)

You write the message once in files/message.md (Markdown), then format_message.py renders it into the four dialects used across channels — so the same announcement can go to Telegram, Element, Slack, and email without re-formatting by hand.

1. Write the source

Edit files/message.md using standard Markdown:

  • # Title — title (becomes the email Subject; bold in chat channels)
  • ## Section — section header
  • **bold**, *italic* / _italic_
  • [label](url) — link
  • - item — bullet
  • `inline code` — monospace
  • ``` fenced block — code block, kept verbatim
  • blank line — paragraph break

2. Generate the per-channel formats

No virtualenv needed — the formatter uses only the Python standard library:

python3 format_message.py

It writes one file per channel to files/out/:

File Channel Format
telegram.html Telegram HTML subset (<b>, <i>, <a>, <code>, <pre>, • bullets)
element.md Element / Matrix Markdown
slack.txt Slack mrkdwn (*bold*, <url|label>, • bullets)
email.txt Email Plain text (Subject line, greeting, sign-off)

The bot (main.py) reads files/out/telegram.html directly, so no extra step is needed for Telegram. Copy-paste element.md, slack.txt, and email.txt into their respective channels.

Regenerate after every edit. If you change message.md you must re-run python3 format_message.py, or the bot will send the previous version.

Notes

  • Reserved characters (&, <, >) are escaped automatically for Telegram and Slack; links are preserved intact.
  • Code is never re-formatted: text inside ` or a ``` fence keeps its _underscores_ and `stars` verbatim instead of being read as emphasis. Telegram gets `` / `
    `, Element and
Slack keep the fences, and email drops the markers.
  • The email greeting and sign-off are editable constants (EMAIL_GREETING, EMAIL_SIGNOFF) at the top of format_message.py; they appear only in the email output and never leak into the chat formats.

Telegram HTML details (only if you hand-edit telegram.html)

The Telegram output uses the Telegram Bot API HTML style. If you edit files/out/telegram.html directly instead of regenerating it:

Supported tags: <b>/<strong>, <i>/<em>, <u>/<ins>, <s>/<strike>/<del>, <code>, <pre>, <a href="...">, <blockquote>.

Not supported: <ul>, <li>, <br>, <p> — these cause a send error. Use plain-text bullet characters (•, -) instead. (The formatter handles all of this for you.)

Pre-send verification

  1. Always send to a test group first (put only your test group in files/groups.txt) to verify formatting before broadcasting to everyone — see Recipient Groups.
  2. If a message is truncated or fails to send, inspect files/out/telegram.html for special characters (such as &) that conflict with HTML parsing. The formatter escapes these automatically; if you hand-edited the file, replace & with &amp; and remove any unsupported tags.