Why do you like rich text?

I know what Word is doing!
The problem you might face with your Approach:
If it would be so easy to do so, it would have been most probably already be done some 20 years ago!
And also, what is the advantage to use a software to alter a CSS via a UI, if you still use a separate software to write your text?
A solution like this would be a nice add on for Ulysses, iA Writer and Apps like this, but I have currently no imagination, to see a real market for this as a single use app!

A quick disclaimer - I am not saying that I am developing a text editor that does this (although I’m not saying otherwise either - it may be an interesting side project). While I agree with this for the most part, it also pays well to keep in mind that the technological landscape now is much different than it was 20 years ago. 20 years ago if I wanted to build a project that processed Markdown I would’ve had to build a parser and editor myself - now, I can just pick one up “off-the-shelf” (link to GitHub).

Well, the point is kind of that this would be 1 unified app. One of the problems Bmosbacker identified earlier is that working with complex plaintext documents requires you to install and familiarize yourself with a whole toolchain of software. We should not require a user to know about CSS to add a cool header to their document.

Refer back to my previous statement re: developing such a text editor. This is not market research - it’s more of an off-the-cuff brainstorm and also an attempt from myself to understand why people pick rich text, as they probably have reasoning that I would not think of (rkaplan’s post being an example of this already).

Are you able to do this from a word processor, @Bmosbacker? I am now curious as to how your workflow makes this possible :joy:

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Rich Text is stable. Notes and papers I wrote in 1990 still open flawlessly with correct formatting in pretty much anything that handles RTF.

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I don’t use a word processor for this, I use Apple Notes, so yes I can. :blush: I was thinking of the problem using apps like Craft for notes. Some on this forum use plain text for all notes and writing. This will not work for me, as I’ve painfully discovered, because the plain text editors do not integrate well with Reminders. I need this because I need to send follow up items from my meetings to Reminders and I don’t want to do a lot of copying and pasting. Some editors do a better job with Things and OmniFocus.

I’m using the word processor for writing projects. :slightly_smiling_face:

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I posted as much before:

Do you work with your RTF documents on mobile, at all? I recall reading about that being a limiting factor for someone (:wink:) on this forum:

Use case

In text files that I create solely for my own use, I’ve found that I need bold and italics to create a sufficient amount of hierarchy and scannability — and, thus, clarity. (Occasionally I’ll use different sizes in section heads, but that’s pretty rare.) In most cases, I use rich text for that.

I forced myself to adopt the use of Markdown in DevonThink a few years ago, just to make sure I wasn’t missing out on having Markdown as a valuable tool. While that practice lingers on, I’ve concluded that I didn’t gain anything from it, and I will likely drift back to using rich text there eventually. The modal characteristic of Markdown that requires switching back and forth between an editing view and a rendered view is not quite a hassle but is definitely a source of friction for me. I’ve never noticed a benefit that made it better than the simple WYSIWYG of rich text.

If I thought I could convince my brain to acclimate itself to processing asterisks and hashes the same way it processes bold and italics, I would skip the rendering and just use plain text Markdown. But that hasn’t happened. My brain prefers bold and italics.

Hypothetical plain text editor

I guess I could be convinced to try it, but I wouldn’t consider myself to be in the market for it. In more than 30 years of writing for a living and as a creative outlet, using computers to do all of it, I’ve worked in a variety of applications and formats, and I have yet to have a moment in which I thought, “I wish I had made this more portable/future-proof.” That need has just never arisen for me.

I’m using Pages on all devices. It opens RTF fine.

On the point of the Hypothetical Plaintext Editor, Overleaf has made some progress implementing something similar:

You can edit in a rich text interface…

But it’s really LaTeX underneath!

Markdown and RTF are two different animals.
RTF is a file format, stored as plain text, but not intended to be read or written by humans.
Markdown is a markup language, also stored as plain text, designed to be read and written by humans.

There are utilities to convert between, etc. as has been covered here on the forum quite a bit.

And I’ll just say, not everyone wants to learn to edit CSS to any degree. I don’t blame them. For most people, just clicking a button or defining a style in a nice interface is sufficient. It doesn’t matter how “easy” it is. There’s no need for them to do it. “Just open the .css in Textmate and change the .p definition…” Not going to happen. “Just opening the .css file” is a whole thing. Learning to use Textmate is a whole thing. Finding your misplaced comma is a whole thing. So programmers make tools so people don’t have to do that if they don’t want to.

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Yep; Pages on iPad here as well.

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RTF is also a kind of marked file. It’s basically tagged ASCII, with some wiggle room for high ASCII and a way to individually extend the format. It’s a Microsoft invention.

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I have no issue editing CSS; I see the benefits there.

But a key point of writing a document is for other people to be able to read it!

If I write something in Rich Text and share it with a friend / colleague / client / whoever, I am confident that 99% of computer users will be able to open it with no friction and no handholding needed.

But if I share something in markdown, there will be a substantial portion of people I interact with who will have no clue what to do with it.

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Everything I share with others I export in a rich text format (usually docx but this thread has convinced me to switch to rtf!) for this reason.

Documents I create for my own use often require multiple formats… using Ulysses I can take a single markdown sermon and export it in a style suitable for presenting from A4 paper, another for A5 paper, or another with a larger font for iPad markup and presentation, or another for sending to the website admin for publication or another for distribution as an outline or another for the order of service with a smaller font. If I were to use Rich Text as my base format the formatting is baked-in to the document.

A few pieces of data against RTF and RTF-ish formats:

XKCD 2109

  1. Several of the well-established academics I’ve worked with insist on pasting images of tables in their documents so that it will continue to look right after they share it with someone else.

  2. Styles are amazing. Unfortunately, no one actually uses Styles. It’s all inline bolding and resizing. (See 1.)

  3. You can’t (easily) use version control tools like Git. (Instead you have Track Changes, I guess.)

I think the world would be better off if everyone learned to use markdown/plain text tools. (Arguably, you could say the same thing about 3 above, but 1 and 2 would still be a problem.)

Writing/editing should be different from production/publishing and should therefore use different tools. Plaintext effectively enforces this separation… RTF editors encourage it to be the same. It introduces problems.

The key exception is collaboration, as others have pointed out. Track Changes/Comments are essential in multi-author documents, and plaintext does not have a great solution for this (no, I don’t want to checkout a new branch with a different stashed HEAD in order to rebase… I just want to delete my colleague’s double-spaces after sentences :wink:).

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As long, as the person you share your text with, should not be able to work on the text itself, I would never share a Document as a RTF, .doc, .pages or whatever!
Documents I share are always PDF, so I can control how they are looking, and what informations are shared, and to be (to a certain point) save, that the text is not altered, after I shared the document!

This is part of the friction with plain text. I’ve stopped sending Markdown to my family and friends as I can’t be sure how it will look to them. Often line endings aren’t even shown correctly! However, any worthy Markdown editor can export to one or more formats, or one could use Brett Terpstra’s Marked app.

I export to PDF for sharing with others. I have not found rich text (specifically the .RTF file format) to be the panacea that others say they have. It is fiddly at best to edit and all kinds of hidden factors can cause problems including, for example, whether fonts are embedded in the document or not.

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Markdown is, by definition, raw material to be converted to something else. If everyone is on board with that, that’s fine, otherwise, giving someone a markdown file is like asking someone over for dinner and handing them a potato.

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Would you like me to “PDF” that potato for you? Or maybe a rich Text Soup would be nice? :slightly_smiling_face:

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One note of caution when using DEVONthink with markdown, etc. files

DEVONthink considers files duplicates of each other if their rendered appearance is the same, not if the files contents are the same.

Here’s where I reported the bug and their response so folks can draw their own conclusions: