![]() ![]() Backwards compatibility Word-processing program file formats have a tendency to change. ![]() ![]() Word itself has gone through multiple incompatible file formats in the last decades, one every couple of years. Over time, you have to keep up with the latest version of the software to do anything at all with a new document, but updating your software may well mean that old documents are no longer identically rendered. With Markdown, no software is necessary to read documents. They are just plain text files with relatively intuitive markings, and the underlying file format (UTF-8 née ASCII) is backward compatible to 1963. Further, typesetting documents in Markdown to get the “nice” version is based on free and open-source software ( markdown, pandoc) and built on other longstanding open source standards ( LaTeX, BibTeX). Poor typesetting Microsoft Word does a generally poor job of typesetting, as exemplified by hyphenation, kerning, mathematical typesetting. This shouldn’t be surprising, since the whole premise of a word-processing program means that the same interface must handle both the specification and typesetting in real-time, a recipe for having to make compromises. Lock-in Because Microsoft Word’s file format is effectively proprietary, users are locked in to a single software provider for any and all functionality. The file formats are so complicated that alternative implementations are effectively impossible. The solution is to use a markup format that allows specification of the document (providing its logical structure) separate from the typesetting of that document. Your document is specified – that is, generated and stored – as straight text. Any formatting issues are handled not by changing the formatting directly via a graphical user interface but by specifying the formatting textually using a specific textual notation. ![]()
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