Why and how to preserve digital content in plaintext format for long-term accessibility and reuse
    • Batman@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      21 hours ago

      Think html renders. May not be exactly right but where I’d start

      <s>There will be a few tickets available at the box office tonight.</s>

  • addie@feddit.ukEnglish
    1·
    2 days ago

    Man alive, all that time I wasted learning LaTeX in that case. Supports tables properly, “floats” pictures and figures about without messing up the flow of text, exceptional support for equations, beautiful printed output…

    Suffers from a completely insane macro-writing language, and its markup is more intrusive in the text than markdown’s is. Also, if you have very specific formatting output requirements (for a receiving publication, for instance) then it can be somewhat painful to whip into shape. Plain-text gang forever, though.

    • dreugeworst@lemmy.mlEnglish
      3·
      1 day ago

      haaave you heard about our lord and saviour Typst?

      same layout algorithm as LaTeX, but:

      • simpler markup
      • sane, consistent scripting language
      • fast compilation, including incremental updates so you can have a process watching your file and instantly create a new PDF on changes
      • easy collaborative editing through their web app
      • actually understandable error messages
  • friend_of_satan@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    2 days ago

    I migrated from mediawiki to markdown in git 8 years ago and never looked back. The ability to publish to any number of static site hosts, and use any number of editors, some that have preview mode, is rad. Data liberty, data portability, wide support, easy to convert, easy to grep, good enough for 95% of written notes.

    My biggest gripe is poor support for tables of data.

    • pebbles@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      2 days ago

      Ugh tables are really the killer. If my editor doesn’t support tables then I avoid them like the plague.

  • nyan@lemmy.cafeEnglish
    01·
    2 days ago

    Handwritten HTML with limited tags works just as well for many purposes (just forbid div, span, and a few others and the complexity you see in most webpages evaporates). The important part is using a text-based format from which information can be extracted even if the fancier display protocols become obsolete.

  • latenightnoir@lemmy.worldEnglish
    01·
    3 days ago

    See, this is why I’m sticking with pen and paper for the really important stuff.

    No offence to the apps themselves, I find them especially useful when I need to transfer info from one device to another. But I do not trust anything purely digital for long-term to permanent archiving, especially not Cloud solutions.

    Also significantly more reliable in case said info need not see the light of day. Just sayin’.

    • taladar@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      3 days ago

      Paper is just about the easiest thing to lose over the years and it certainly doesn’t last forever. You are one bit of water damage, one fire, one break-in,… away from losing it all permanently with paper.

      • latenightnoir@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        3 days ago

        Same argument can be made about a hard drive, or a data tape, which is why I think we can all agree backups are vital in every type of archival action.

  • John Richard@lemmy.worldEnglish
    12·
    3 days ago

    I wholly disagree with this after using markdown for everything for a few reasons, but it may work for some people if you really love operating from a basic CLI. Some people also get by with storing everything in plain-text files as well. Why not, plain-text will still be supported as well.

    Markdown, especially CommonMark, will likely never provide what you want. Is it convenient when you have hundreds or thousands of files to manually manage? Most likely you’ll constantly be searching for ways to make markdown work more like a word processor & CMS, because what you really want is a powerful WYSIWYG content management platform.

    I’m not going to judge someone if they are content with basic markdown. It isn’t my place to. But to make a statement like, “if it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown” is preaching from a bubble.

    • Womble@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      3 days ago

      The articles point was that markdown (or other similar utf-8 text based documents) is the best guarantee you have for the files being usable into the indefinite future. As you get into the complicated formats of things like word processors the less likely that format will be meaningfully usable in 10,20,50 years time, good luck reading a obsolete word processor file from the 80s today.

      • JWBananas@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        2 days ago

        LibreOffice opens my old WordPerfect documents just fine. What didn’t last was the compact diskettes that some of them were lost to.

        • muelltonne@feddit.orgEnglish
          1·
          1 day ago

          WordPerfect really comes from a different time. Good look reading the stuff from your iOS notes app that saves everything somewhere in the cloud and that has no export option in 10 years.

          • JWBananas@lemmy.worldEnglish
            01·
            1 day ago

            Preposterous. You need only install the iCloud client, and they (along with everything else in your iCloud drive) sync just fine.

    • taladar@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      3 days ago

      WYSIWYG, Word Processors and CMSs are the kind of thing I don’t even want for my current content (or any content I made in the last 25+ years), why would I want any of them as an archive format?

      • John Richard@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        2 days ago

        Why not just use plain text then? I mean if your important content can be summarized into the most basic structure, why not just create your own markup format that makes sense to you? Makes no sense why you’d limit yourself to CommonMark.

  • Extrawurst@feddit.orgEnglish
    0·
    3 days ago

    I have a tendency to jump between different note-taking services. Markdown seems like it could maybe be a cure for me… By now i have no idea where I should look for a note I know I’ve taken, is it in notion, onenote, apple notes, and so on…