As I mentioned in my previous post, I’m finding that a lot of TTRPG tools are looking towards Markdown for their content editors. I believe that I know the answer why: compared to Rich Text Formatting, it’s easier to handle when building an app. I’ve handled my fair share of RTF input components over the years and none of them are kind. I don’t know if rich text is more complex than it should be, or is the right amount of complex, but Markdown seems to be The People’s Champion because it’s written using symbols and patterns, and can then be displayed with the same bells and whistles that RTF displays. The only downside is that, unlike RTF, Markdown documents are edited in one mode and displayed in another.

The screenshot above is what I wrangled Obsidian into. When switching to “reader” mode, the layout looks like this:

That’s pretty sexy in my opinion, and while I wouldn’t necessarily keep the bulleted lists, I could use this layout for prose and paragraph, images, and other elements, and be reasonably happy with the result.

But oye…getting to this point makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. For me, thinking about a “flavor” of content I want to create requires my environment to be “just so” — hence the whole blasted quest I set myself on to find a tool I can use for my TTRPG needs. Markdown in it’s naked form is assuredly not that. Basic Markdown might be OK, relying on header formatting, dividers, links, italics, bold, and the occasional bulleted or numbered list, but I really like the floating box layout you see above. I do not like the Markdown (and underlying CSS) that I had to write to get it because when it comes time to fill those boxes with info, I have to work within the mess that is naked Markdown. At that point, I’m completely thrown out of my headspace because, as a developer, I see all of the symbols and immediately switch from prose mode to coding mode, which is not where I want nor need to be.

So now I’m off to look at a few other apps which I believe do not use Markdown, although I haven’t confirmed that. At this point I’m hoping they don’t because I feel like I’m running out of options. That would mean that I’d either have to hang up the effort, or force myself to work within the confines of Markdown.