I do a lot of work on the go. Offline. Sometimes it takes a long time to push changes to a remote repository. As always, Murphy’s law applies, and the one repo that explodes into my face is the one with ten days worth of work in it.

While working, suddenly my laptop hang. Music looping. No mouse movement. Nothing. The only possible solution was to do a cold-reboot. I was not worried. Everything was saved, and I only changed a few lines and can easily recover if something went awry. So I rebooted.

Once back in the system, I immediately wanted to do a git status and git diff. Git spat back the following error message:

My Laptop had shown some strange and erratic behaviour over the last few days already. I already left a memtest running for about 24 hours earlier this week without errors. The only possible explanation left was the hard-disk.

Fun times ahead! 10 days of work at risk… 10 days of important changes! Sweat building up my forehead. Bloody sweat!

I trust my tools to keep my code safe. I trust git. I trust vim. I do microscopic commits, and I knew my current uncommitted changes only involved a few lines. So maybe only the last commit got corrupted? Let’s see…

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docutils supports adding a wide range of unicode glyphs into documents, while still keeping the source document readable and plain ASCII.

The character mappings are available in include files, and have to be included into the document before being useful.

For example, adding a horizontal arrow is done by including 'isoamsa.txt' which provides (amongst others) the replacement |hArr|. An example document might be:

Hav a look at the extensions available in the official docutils distribution for more information.