Quote:
Originally Posted by skreutzer
If RobertDDL is interested, he could write converters from the other flavors to the standard flavor.
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No, sorry, I'm not. I have designed my own, whatever you may call it, enhanced plain text format, as a deliberately simpler alternative to existing markup languages. It covers the very few essential formatting options that are really needed with 99% of fiction, when you want to stay with plain text -- it requires zero learning for the reader, maybe 5 minutes for the author/editor, and will hardly run into any compatibility troubles.
For me, the main disadvantage of plain text, when used for long texts, is the lack of a working TOC. (Bookmarks aren't the problem, as they are usually provided by the reading software or device.) I have written the conversion tool to HTML mainly for the purpose that HTML can then be converted to ePub, which results in an operational TOC. (It wouldn't be much of an effort for a reading software to generate a TOC from the HTML heading tags, this shouldn't take more than a fraction of a second, but I haven't seen it so far and I'm not able to write it myself.)
So, I am aware that other markup formats are more powerful and offer many more features, but my point is, that in most cases they are not needed (non-fiction would be a different matter). Where they are, Markdown or other markup languages are of course better suited, but they aren't what I'm interested in.