Prose in a worksheet

A comment is Markdown. This worksheet is what pins that: every construct below is in the golden snapshot beside it, so a change to how prose renders shows up here in the diff.

Paragraphs

Consecutive comment lines are one paragraph. Prose wraps at whatever width the file is written to, and comes out as a paragraph rather than as a stack of one-line ones. A blank line starts the next paragraph, and so does a bare comment marker like the one above this line.

Headings

# through ######, with a space after the marker. A level-1 heading at the top of a worksheet names the document: nomo html takes the page's title from there rather than from the file name.

Lists

Bullets take -, * or +:

the marker needs a space after it
an item continues onto the lines under it, so a long one wraps like this rather than becoming a second item
and there is no nesting: indentation is a wrap

Numbered items take 1. or 1) and keep the number they were written with. That matters because a worksheet numbers its steps with the mathematics between them, so each step arrives on its own:

State the load and the supply.

P_{load}

3.6 kW

V_{line}

230 V

I_{load}

\frac{P_{load}}{V_{line}}

\frac{3.6 kW}{230 V}

15.6522 A

Size the conductor from the current. Six amps per square millimetre is what this installation works to.

J_{\max}

\frac{6 A}{{mm}^{2}}

A_{\min}

\frac{I_{load}}{J_{\max}}

\frac{15.6522 A}{6000000 m⁻²·A}

2.6087 \times 10^{−6} m^{2}

A_{\min}

2.6087 {mm}^{2}

Check the drop over the run at the section actually installed.

ρ

\frac{0.0175 ohm \cdot {mm}^{2}}{m}

L_{run}

35 m

A_{used}

4 {mm}^{2}

V_{drop}

\frac{2 \cdot ρ \cdot L_{run} \cdot I_{load}}{A_{used}}

\frac{2 \cdot 1.75 \times 10^{−8} m³·kg·s⁻³·A⁻² \cdot 35 m \cdot 15.6522 A}{4 \times 10^{−6} m^{2}}

4.79348 V

{drop}_{ratio}

\frac{V_{drop}}{V_{line}}

\frac{4.79348 V}{230 V}

0.0208412

Inline

Two markers, and only two. A backtick pair sets a code span, like this, and ** sets bold.

A code span holds its content literally, so it is how a worksheet writes about the markers themselves: ** inside one stays **.

Everything else stays text, and each refusal has a corpus measurement behind it rather than a preference:

_ is not emphasis. Worksheet prose is full of names like V_drop, and 106 corpus prose lines carry two or more underscores — every one an identifier.
A single * is not emphasis either, because * is the multiplication operator: 61 corpus prose lines pair one and every pair has arithmetic between it.
** with a space just inside the pair is text, so a ** b is a product and not the start of anything.
An unmatched marker is text. This ` is one backtick and the sentence continues past it.

What stays prose

The subset is closed. Three things are outside it on purpose, and this is what they look like when a worksheet writes them:

The three dashes on the next line are text, not a rule. --- There are no thematic breaks and no setext headings, because ' --- resources --- is what opens the resource trailer and a worksheet must not acquire a section break by writing about a range of values.

Leading whitespace is a wrap and not a code block, so a line indented like this one joins the line above it.

#3 is a screw size rather than a heading, because a heading needs a space after its marker.

A backslash protects a marker that was meant literally, so the line below is prose rather than a one-item list:

- 40 °C is the lower limit of the qualified range.

And none of it is markup

Prose is escaped on its way into the document. A worksheet may have been written by the SMath importer out of a file nobody here wrote, so <b>this</b> is four characters and a word, not bold text.