I'm kind of surprised they're thinking in terms of software rather than file formats though. Software choice is a good thing. Lock in to a file format, even if technically open, isn't a good thing.
And plain text is not plain. You do a presentation with plain text. You aren't using those hyphens as hyphens anymore. So how does that impact those with screen readers? I mentioned CSV, that is still a format, it still has to be defined, you still have to decide how to embed a comma in it.
We are talking about the governments of a continent. You have to have documents that are accessible to everyone. You have to have documents that are secure, you have to have documents that cannot be modified. Reducing that to plain text, is like saying unicode is easy because they're just characters.
I like iA Writer, but I don't think distraction free writing will solve our office problems.
PS: Also, fuck their AI bullshit, slop engine integration is so disgusting, I can't believe I've paid for this shit.
Maybe we can enjoy the benefits of Electron in 8.0. At least then I can change the cursor color from the ugly cold blue. - You had to force your corpo branding on me while I'm writing didn't you.
iA Writer is very well one very solid and proven solution for certain use cases. In fact, I would argue that, independent of what app you use, plaintext plus markup (with the right set of templates) is, methodically, economically and logically, a much more efficient solution than Word. And I'd even argue that it is more efficient in most government, school, NGO and corporate cases.
You may find that delusional. I'm certainly not delusional about the real challenge here. It is not what app you use, but the network of format and formatting expectations, and to make people change habits. After 15 years of trying to convince people to focus on content rather than form, we know very well just how incredibly hard it is to convince people and make them stay in what they enjoy more against everybody else.
