simple formatting possibilities

[Russell L. Harris]

On Thu, Aug 27, 2020 at 01:40:08AM -0400, Jon LaBadie wrote:
>Both a friend and I organize weekly online bridge games for
>20-30 players.  My seating notices go out as simple text.  He
...
>I don't like the attachment approach but the formatting (minimal,
>bold, alignment,?) he uses and the 2 column arrangement would be useful.
...
>Is there anything I could use to create such "formated text", then
>distribute it in the body of a mutt message having some hope that
>the recipients see it correctly?

I know nothing about bridge, but years ago, when there was such a
thing as a newspaper, I always looked at the chess column, which
appeared on the same page as the bridge column.  The chess column
typically presented a puzzle, in the form of a graphical diagram.  I
seem to recall seeing something similar in the bridge column.  As I
recall, there is a LaTeX package for drawing a chess diagram, so I
would expect there also is a LaTeX package for drawing a bridge
diagram.

Also, the chess community long ago developed a simple standard called
"Portable Game Notation" (PGN) which facilitates
postal-chess-via-email as well as capture, transmittal, and analysis
of games, either in-progress or complete.  Computer chess packages
typically read and write PGN files, some even automatically extract
PGN from email messages.  Again, I would expect something of the sort
exists for the bridge community.

RLH