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    Hurray for plain text. I also use troff (e.g., for my CV), and I expect that even if maintenance of groff stops tomorrow, I’ll still be able to use it on some variant of Unix for quite a while – after all, we can still build most Unix C code from the 1980s with little changes. And besides, like the author says, being a plain text based format, it’s readable as it is.

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      This is partly why I have switched to Orgmode for almost everything, including invoices.

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        Too, you can export from org mode through LaTeX to get really handsome documents, for those times when typography and layout matter (and they do, in many contexts.)

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        Sounds more like “use open formats when possible”.

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          I wouldn’t be confident of being able to get OpenOffice working 2 or 3 decades from now.

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            If you use an xml/latex/rtf/json/markdown document format then worst case you can at least get the text data and maybe some basic bold/italic/underline information out of it by writing a parser yourself, best case some application/library still understands it.

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            human-readable open formats - if all else fails you should be able to extract the content and/or write a renderer with just the file to look at

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            s/plain text/utf-8/

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              Plain doesn’t necessarily mean ASCII. Though I’d be wary of using combining family member characters and other funky features of Unicode in texts that I want to remain readable in 2100.

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                Eh, ASCII was made for teletypes and EBCDIC for punched cards and we can still read them nearly 80 years on. Even the funky characters like ENQ and SO/SI.

                Unicode is a beast but its a well specified beast. Our progeny won’t have trouble with it.