Re:If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown
by torstenvl on Wednesday February 26, 2025 @11:59AM
(#43185545)
RTF is extremely easy to parse if you assume it isn't using an ancient code page. This is a pretty safe assumption since almost no modern software even supports all the code pages in the RTF standard. Word is far more likely store Arabic in default Windows-1252 with \u_____-specified code points than to use code page 708 or something.
Is it as easy as Markdown? No. But it should take about an afternoon for a halfway competent programmer to make an rtf2txt utility from scratch that correctly handles > 90% of the RTF files you're likely to encounter in practice.
> still text-based
The point about Markdown is that you don't need a complex parser[0] to be able to interpret the files - a simple human can read a Markdown file and get the gist of what is going on. RTF has a whole mess of control strings and codes going on that get in the way of a simple visual understanding.
> I can't express simple formatting such as "make this text red" in Markdown.
You can add raw HTML to Markdown which would accomplish this (at the expense of moving away from the "simple plain text", obvs.) There's a bunch of Markdown parsers with extensions for this kind of thing though (from what I can see, they're all not entirely "simple" either which is a shame.)