Quote:
Originally Posted by eschwartz
That is a positively terrifying, horrible idea.
Plaintext files by definition cannot possibly be formatted, with options or templates or anything.
As soon as you add any information that allows you to apply a template or any sort of options (other than a base font and font size for 100% homogenized text), you have magically transmuted it into rich text!
And once you are using rich text, you might as well package it in e.g. a ZIP folder, at which point you have an "EPUB". 
This has already been exhaustively discussed here: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...=243326&page=7
If you like, you can continue that conversation, there. |
Actually, there is some merit in what he said, but not in that way. Plaintext is always evolving, as hard as that is to understand if you don't already know I what I mean =)
The answers are in markup languages. Digital books are in html right now, which is a markup language too, but unreadable and capable of so much more. What digital books need is a humane markup language, like reStructuredText (which is my favorite) or Markdown (which is the universal favorite). If I knew that it would be accepted, I would have created a humane markup language for ebooks, but I know it won't be right now.
But I think future is with them. You can write, read and display easily. You can even define formatting at the beginning of the file, which would make it ridiculously easy to edit.