Ugh. Once again have I been sent a document in an inferior file format. Another .docx, .odt or maybe even a .doc if I'm lucky. The last time I've sent a document in a format like this would be around when I was in 3rd grade. Since then, I have gained some awareness regarding online etiquette; that and my opinions about it I would like to present in the following article.
First, I will explain why receiving such formats causes me an allergic reaction. To keep it simple, you can't ensure your recipient will see your precisely crafted document the way you do; there could be different fonts, different formatting, different everything. (If you happened to be my classmate, you might have had the honor of working with the eyesore which professor Řezáč's tests are; apart from being borderline incomprehensible, they are an excellent demonstration for why documents in these file formats shouldn't be sent around.)
Alright then. Understood. But what to use instead? Excellent question, I'm glad you asked. Now, let us think for a bit. If only there was a document format that would be portable... oh wait! Isn't that what PDF stands for? Portable Document Format?
Contrary to popular belief, PDF doesn't actually stand for Pretty Damn Funky (or at least not in the context of file formats). PDF is a document format created in 1991 by Adobe (or Dr John Warnock, to be precise). I could describe its history further, but it's not exactly interesting, so I will skip this for now. Its main "selling point" is that no matter where, how or using what software you open a PDF document, it's guaranteed to look exactly the same. Stupendous! Why doesn't everybody use it then? Apart from most basic office software not being able to edit it (even though you can do it), I can only guess.
Wait, what? Adobe? That's disgusting! I know, dear reader. I know. As much as I hate Adobe myself, in this scenario, I have to adhere to one of my favourite sayings: "The only thing better than perfect is standardised." In this case, PDF has been pronounced the format for sharing documents online by none other than the International Standards Organisation. Thankfully, as of 2008-07-01, PDF has also become an open format, as opposed to being a proprietary format controlled by Adobe.
As something of a typography nerd as well as a lover of beautifully rendered maths equations, diagrams etc. myself, PDF holds a special place in my heart. However, there is one slight problem I've got with it.
"In the beginning, God said: 'Let there be light', and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good." I wasn't there, so I can't talk about the exact procedure, but I'm pretty sure the plain text format has been created just after that. Plain text format is, as far as my knowledge goes, the most universal file format for storing text there is. Heck, if you really wanted to, you could probably display one of those on your microwave or your smart fridge. This is the most effective way to store any data.
Alright, so it's editable, effective and universal. Why don't we use that everywhere, then? Sadly, no one thing is perfect in life. The drawback of this format is that it's not possible to display fancy stuff like bold text, italics, underlined text, images, let alone fonts, diagrams, maths equations and so on. But wait! Workarounds have obviously been made. It would be insanely cool to be able to share more complicated documents than just text, right? This is where markup languages come into play. The most widespread one is called Markdown. And honestly? I can't bear it.
Don't get me wrong: the concept is amazing. It's the execution I have a problem with. For starters, Markdown doesn't even have one standard form. There's CommonMark, MultiMarkdown, GitHub Markdown and a gazillion and a half of another flavours of this unstandardised glory. Coming back to that quote, no thanks.
This is why I've always been more of an AsciiDoc fan. It seems to have everything Markdown doesn't have, yada yada. This is all nice, but I have a confession to make.
I could never bring myself to use one of these formats for more than just a few documents before promptly returning to what I used before (and love dearly). I know, I betrayed you. I'm sorry.
Talking about what I use, I think it's time to introduce the love of my life (please don't use this statement against me). I believe these strike just the perfect amount of balance between plain-text files and beautiful output. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, everybody welcome on stage Typst. Since this article is getting pretty long though, I think I can keep this for sometime else. Until then, thank you for reading my rant and I hope to see you around next time.