The Unicode Standard was a revolution in transcending the limitations of traditional character encodings such as ASCII, because Unicode supports other characters in addition to the 128 available in the English language, which makes it universal. And the UTF-8 format was a master at implementing the Unicode standard while incorporating ASCII. In fact, ASCII is now a subset of UTF-8.
This information is relevant because the ASCII format has survived the time and is considered one of the best formats to store electronic texts (e-texts) that last in time. Most public domain novells, books, tales and stories available in Project Gutenberg are in UTF-8 format.
In the words of Project Gutenberg:1
The major point of all this is that years from now Project Gutenberg etexts are still going to be viable, but program after program, and operating system after operating system are going to go the way of the dinosaur, as will all those pieces of hardware running them. Of course, this is valid for all Plain Vanilla ASCII etexts … not just those your access has allowed you to get from Project Gutenberg. The point is that a decade from now we probably won’t have the same operating systems, or the same programs and therefore all the various kinds of etexts that are not Plain Vanilla ASCII will be obsolete. We need to have etexts in files a Plain Vanilla search/reader program can deal with; this is not to say there should never be any markup... just those forms of markup should be easily convertible into regular, Plain Vanilla ASCII files so their utility does not expire when programs to use them are no longer with us. Remember all the trouble with CONVERT programs to get files changed from old word processor programs into Plain Vanilla ASCII?
Of course, Project Gutenberg only accepts plain text (.txt files in UTF-8), but markdown is a markup language that is essentially pure text, that is, it has the same readability when read in a plain text editor.
Markdown a lightweight (or humane) markup language with simple, unobtrusive syntax. It is designed to be easy to write using any generic text editor and easy to read in its raw form. Markdown is a markup language intended for creating formatted text using any plain text editor. In fact, it's so simple and unobtrusive that a person can open a markdown file (extension ".md") and read it as if it were plain text file. You can rename it's extension to ".txt" if you prefer. On Windows, just use notepad, and on Linux, plain text editors abound: gedit (and its variants), kate, emacs, vim, nano etc.
Files written in UTF-8 format using markdown language are not only easy to read and open in any operating system and plain text editor software, but they are also easy to convert to any professional or more complex format.
The easiest way to do this is to import your content directly into a LibreOffice or Microsoft Office text editor, or into editors for professional publications like Scribus or Adobe InDesign.
However, the pandoc program is available for several operating systems: Windows, Linux, BSD, macOS, etc. It lets you convert to and from many different formats. And it's free and open source.
Of course, pandoc is a command line tool, designed to be used in command prompt, powershell, linux terminal etc., but it's so easy as write this:
$ pandoc test.md -f markdown -t docx -s -o test.docxThe filename test.md tells pandoc which file to convert. The -s option says to create a "standalone" file, with a header and footer, not just a fragment. And the -o test.docx says to put the output in the file test.docx. Note that we could have omitted -f markdown -t docx, since pandoc is smart enough to understand the nature of both the input and the output file, but it doesn’t hurt to include them.2
The overall appearance of the converted file is very good and there is nothing to complain about.
July 27, 2023 (revised May 19, 2024)
Daniel Dias Rodrigues
Footnotes
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Hart, Michael (1992, August). The History and Philosophy of Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/about/background/history_and_philosophy.html ↩
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Getting started with pandoc: Step 6 - Converting a file. Pandoc: a universal document converter. https://pandoc.org/getting-started.html#step-6-converting-a-file ↩