Short answer: don’t. Managing whitespace in plain text templates is a headache-and-a-half…

God forbid you should want your template to have some if statements or for loops! Suddenly you have a steamy, tangled mess on your hands.

Writing and maintaining templates in non-whitespace-sensitive HTML is faaar more sane. So my advice: write your template in HTML, render it to a string, and then use the html2text library to convert the rendered HTML to plaintext.

Check out html2text on github

html2text actually renders the result as markdown, which applies pretty sensible and readable formatting, even for non-technical recipients.

Ideally, of course, you should be sending HTML in almost every case anyway. But you still always need plain text as a fallback. Well, now you have an easy way to generate that fallback – without any need to maintain both an HTML and plain text template.

Here’s a gist to show how it’s done: