When you want to ensure that things are rendered in a particular way, Markdown might not be the best solution—it's for content, not style. In many cases (not al

When you want to ensure that things are rendered in a particular way, Markdown might not be the best solution—it's for content, not style. In many cases (not all!), style doesn't matter much. It's better to give each device (desktop app, ebook reader, printer) flexibility of display according to user needs and preferences (dark mode, contrast, font size, fonts for dyslexia or personal taste). HTML gives more control - from plaintext through basic formatting to building pretty much anything. This freedom can be a slippery slope - first comes red text, then custom fonts, then some SVG showing the font, and before you know it, you're building an app. (That's one thing I love about Hacker News - they kept it simple by not allowing any formatting in posts.) PDFs are great when you need an exact visual presentation. And yes, I keep plenty of things in PDFs. However, it is not a format I convert to too often—usually, I prefer the flexibility to reflow text for different screen sizes. YMMV. As for RTF - I'm not sure about its current niche. It's a Microsoft proprietary format with TeX-like syntax, so for custom applications you might need to write your own parser rather than using standard tools like XML parsers. XML feels much cleaner to work with compared to the jungle of other formats we used to live in. That said, if it works for you, great! I'm just curious why, in this case, you prefer them to a subset of HTML.