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I'm sitting here, trying to figure out something. See, I use Pages '09 as my
word processor of choice. It works well, the UI stays out of my way, and the
text and font rendering doesn't look like utter garbage by default (Looking at
you, LibreOffice and OpenOffice). It also produces PDFs, which is my preferred
format for posting my works online.

The problem is, it's also MacOS only, and while that's fine for me as a Mac 
user, it does kinda limit me if I need to suddenly move to another platform. I
mean, I can't open Pages documents in anything but Pages, so that's a problem.

Of course, I could just export everything to DocX when I'm done, but then I
start building up multiple copies that might not be synced, and it becomes a
mess if I have to start putting out for RTF for some gallery sites, and so on.

In fact, one of the *big* problems in the furry fandom is that, among the major
art gallery sites, not all formats are accepted between them.

- FurAffinity: txt, txt with bbcode, doc, docx, odt, pdf, rtf
- Weasyl: txt with markdown, pdf, GDoc (embedded)
- Inkbunny: txt, txt with bbcode, rtf
- SoFurry: embedded rich text editor, txt with markdown (through a fallback 
           editor)
- Furry Network: txt with markdown

See a problem there? The closest I can come to all five is plaintext, but for
formatting, three use Markdown, and two require bbcode. So normal plaintext 
would be the most supported way of uploading. The problem is, you still need
some form of formatting for emphisis in storytelling, since you're doing it
over text. My usual use of /italics/ and *bold* isn't all that common, and it
clashes with Markdown, so because I can't turn off markdown formatting for
Weasyl, SoFurry, or FurryNetwork, that's out.

(I only use FurAffinity, Weasyl, and InkBunny myself.)

Using Markdown might be the best bet, but without displaying the formatting,
_this_ looks like it should be underlined, *this* looks like it should be bold,
and **this** looks like it should be superbolded. _*This*_ just doesn't
work everywhere, and looks like it should be bold underline. Oh! And you can't
add manual indentation into the file, since a double space at the beginning of
a line creates a blockquote, so proper firstline indentation for readability is 
gone as well.

That said, I'll probably go back to using plaintext again. It's ubiquitous, I
can work on it with my AlphaSmart 3000 if needed, I can add my own ascii 
formatting as desired, and I could always write my own markup-to-HTML converter
if I really wanted to.

Plus, plaintext is just awesome.

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