The future of education is plain text
Plaintext certainly seems more attractive the more docs I write. Over the years, with both work and personal projects, I've used every format from:<p>- Notepad<p>- Microsoft Word<p>- PDF<p>- Twiki<p>- Various proprietary WSYWIG that compiles to HTML<p>- JIRA<p>- Raw HTML<p>- Markdown (several flavors)<p>With nearly every kind of migration, there are numerous pain points. The "raw" formats are a nightmare to edit and update, and the compiled ones require several hours of changing syntax, image locations, etc.<p>I've been getting so tired of having to re-do stuff on different platforms that more of my docs are starting as Plaintext and then written in pseudocode markup for areas that I know will change on every platform (e.g. generating a table of contents, image tags, etc).<p>Having just coded an entire website from scratch that was basically just documentation, Markdown comes remarkably close to doing what I want, <i>except</i> when the common format fails to meet my needs, which forces me to then have to switch to a specific flavor of Markdown in order to get something as basic as tables.<p>The docs of mine that seem most resilient to platform shifts (other than plaintext) are the ones that are written in or compiled to longstanding formats like LaTeX or HTML.<p>So perhaps my takeaway is, write in something readable that compiles to something widely available. That will provide the least headache.