Seth Kenlon

Authored Comments

Thanks!

The greatest / only frustration I have had with plain text is inconsistency in formatting. As long as the plain text is consistent, it can be parsed and up-converted to rst or markdown, and then to epub, which brings the otherwise humble format into modern e-reading convenience standards.

The problem is when you get fancy stylized plain text with surprising indentaitons and ascii art and stuff like that, Then it's a matter of desperately trying to normalise the text into some parse-able format, but in the end it's basically manual conversion. Or you just live with plain text, funky line breaks and all.

I guess the moral of that story is that we as content creators should NEVER assume anything about how people will be consuming the deliverable. For every 7 people who will use an e-reader, there will be those 3 whacko's using a phone, a web browser, and a TI-85.