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> It is a more complex format than Markdown Depending on what one means by “Markdown” and how completely you want to support RTF, I might argue RTF is way simp
by chrismorgan 2y ago
> It is a more complex format than Markdown
Depending on what one means by “Markdown” and how completely you want to support RTF, I might argue RTF is way simpler than Markdown. Certainly it’ll be more consistent.
Markdown is far better suited for human authoring; RTF is a data format, not a markup language. And you can cut a lot of corners with Markdown and it mostly won’t bite you. But if you want to do things properly, Markdown gets rather complicated, whereas RTF stays comparatively simple after the initial parsing/serialising cost, especially if you exclude newer features like XML markup.
- tengwar2 2y ago> Markdown is far better suited for human authoring A lot of people are assuming that you would edit RTF manually. There's no earthly reason to do that.
- chrismorgan 2y agoOh, I’ve definitely edited RTF manually, when I wanted fine control, or to strip out certain formatting but not all. But it’s definitely not intended for manual editing; and it’s hopeless if you want to go beyond ASCII, as you can’t (from memory) just use UTF-8 or UTF-16 encoding, you need to escape non-codepage characters as \uNUMBER?, where NUMBER is the signed decimal representation of a UTF-16 code unit, which is probably the most absurd escape representation I’ve ever encountered. (The character after the number, here and normally ? these many years, represents the fallback character to use if Unicode is not supported. \uc0 can disable that so it’d be just \uNUMBER. It’s cases like that that really show how RTF was designed as an internal file format for things like Word, back before they fully supported Unicode. RTF has not aged very well as a file format.)