Off topic, but that’s a great diagram!
These are similar to my personal findings as well. As an academic, I had versions of multiple papers going back and forth with my advisors and other authors, so using anything other than Word was an instant no-go. Scrivener and Ulysses are great if you are writing in isolation, but anything that requires collaboration with “non-tech nerd” types will be useless.
I wish I could take credit but it but it is from the book, Radical Candor, which I highly recommend to anyone who supervises others. It is required reading for my senior leadership team and for my grad students.
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I haven’t read through most of the replies here so maybe this has already been covered, but I use both. It all depends on what I want and what context I am working in.
To me the primary difference is wrapped up in this line from the original Markdown syntax rules by John Gruber (emphasis in original):
The idea for Markdown is to make it easy to read, write, and edit prose. HTML is a publishing format; Markdown is a writing format. Thus, Markdown’s formatting syntax only addresses issues that can be conveyed in plain text.
When I am writing, I prefer Markdown/plain text. I don’t need to worry or care about formatting. I’m just getting prose down. However, when I am publishing (especially for printed document), then I prefer rich text. Sure there are more sophisticated publishing programs than what you get in a word processor, but I don’t need those tools for what I do. So a basic rich text editor serves my needs fine (whether that be Word, Pages, or whatever).
With that said, I am comfortable working with HTML and CSS. However, there is a level of indirection there. I much prefer working in the wysiwyg environment for print. Interestingly, in the paragraph proceeding the one quoted above, we find this:
Markdown’s syntax is intended for one purpose: to be used as a format for writing for the web.
Of course, at the time that was written, I doubt anyone (including Gruber) imagined that HTML would be so widespread and not be contained only to “the web.” Perhaps “the web” should be interpreted here to mean anywhere where HTML/CSS is rendered on screen. And that sums up where I use Markdown specifically.
In the end, here is my (simplified) decision tree.
- If the text will only ever be viewed in a text editor => use plain text
- If prose will be rendered onscreen only => use Markdown
- If structured content for onscreen rendering => use HTML/CSS (or more likely a script to generate HTML)
- If the document will be printed => use rich text
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The main reason I started using Markdown was so my existing ‘markup’ would finally be rendered. I always used asterisks to denote bold and/or italic words, so Markdown was pretty easy to get into. That’s probably 95% of everything I need from Markdown, which rarely gets rendered on the fly unless you are using the 1 or 2 apps which do inline preview.
I’m not sure if there is an RTF app where you can bold, italicize, underline, strikethrough, etc. just using keystrokes or extra symbols. If so, I’d use it!
Possibly not what you’re looking for, but Google Docs does, converting from markdown to rich text on the fly.
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Good news - I’m already using it then! Although I tend to use Sheets for most things. But Docs are handy.
It’s not on by default, but easy to enable…
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Superior inline preview was an unexpected benefit of adopting the NotePlan app and its Markdown editor. NotePlan’s on-the-fly rendering is beautiful and the best I’ve seen among Markdown editors!
Isn’t NotePlan rather a Task Manager, then a Markdown Editor?
Any word processor that I have used supports keyboard shortcuts for bold and italic (CMD-B & CMD-I). While you can select the relevant text and use the keyboard shortcut to toggle the state, you can also use the shortcut to open and close bold/italic while typing, just as you might type Markdown tokens. The only difference is that in Markdown you can still see the opening and closing delimitators, whereas in rich text, they are invisible to you as the user.
As an aside, if you open a .rtf file in a plain text editor, you can see the source code of the document. While there is a lot of not-so-human-readable stuff in there, if you look hard enough, you can find the opening and closing delimitators for bold, italic, etc. The point is that rich text formats and their editors are not so different from Markdown (or HTML). It’s just that they hide the markup from the user.
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Apple’s TextEdit lets you use standard keyboard commands for RTF So does Bear, for Markdown. Bear Pro lets you export Markdown as HTMLor RTF or a number of other formats.
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NotePlan’s Markdown editor is integral to its note taking and task management. And it just happens to produce beautiful text in my opinion. (I use the standard theme – system font, black text on white background with orange accents.)
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NotePlan is under appreciated, IMO.
Note and Plan - it does both really well.
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