Why not? A lot of people do that. Me, for example 
RTF is wonderfully easy to use.
What works for 5 pages also works for 100 pages. At least in my experience
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Ah, I see your point. And if “evidence” meant absolute truth you’d be correct. Here’s how it plays out in employment discrimination cases: e.g. 1) When some documents can be used as evidence to support a contention that X took a certain action because the plaintiff had performance deficiencies, but other evidence contains X’s statements to co-managers expressing bias against people with disabilities working in her office; 2) the first draft of Y’s performance appraisal says her performance was outstanding, but the copy issued to her after she rejected her boss’s text-requests for a date rate her as less than acceptable and recommend termination. Fabricated evidence is still considered evidence unless you can find contradictory evidence. When I did food safety work, the government provided real lab results showing that the level of bacteria on chicken produced in a specific group of plants was, on average, 0%; whistleblowers provided documentation showing the government required those particular plants to use a new chemical rinse, and other documentation showing that the chemical rinse would prevent the government’s testing program from detecting any bacteria that was on the chicken. . . all of those docs are evidence.
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That’s great! As for me, well, I couldn’t write a novel if Dickens himself sat behind me. 
Ah, misunderstanding—sorry, my bad. What I meant was that I use RTF for short and long texts. I couldn’t write a novel even if Dickens were sitting on my lap 
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Yes, you’re absolutely right, of course, and your explanations make perfect sense. I could have figured that out myself if I’d still been awake
I understand the view that RTF may be weak, but that’s probably more the RTF editor’s fault than the file format.
The old Nisus Writer Pro used an extended version of RTF as its native file type. It was certainly capable of book-length work.
I always liked plain text. Formatting for output should be a separate thing, like LaTeX or Markdown processors.
Unfortunately, I’ve never gotten far with LaTeX and Markdown, while very handy, doesn’t go far enough.
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To be honest, I’ve never really understood this argument. Why shouldn’t formatting on the screen be important?
Well-formatted text helps me read it faster and find what I’m looking for. Styling elements like bold, italics, and colors (as offered by RTF) are absolutely essential for me on the screen. Plain text is just a collection of letters that all look the same 
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They’re aiming for very different goals: LaTeX is meant for typesetting, MD evolved as a way to make writing HTML easier.
IMO, the relevant question is what the final target of a document is. For a book that goes to a publisher, Word might be required. For a scientific artical in physics, mathematics etc, LaTeX might be the tool of choice. If you’re producing a magazine for wider audience QuarkXpress or Insight might be the best program for the job.
If you’re writing blog articles or other texts that are intended for the web, MD is nearly perfect.
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I think this is a misunderstanding. Formatting, on screen and on paper, is important for the reader. It’s just not helpful for many people who write. For them, a lot of formatting gets in the way and distracts.
And pure text formats are very easy to transform. Try extracting all links from a Word document with a script, lets say to check them, vs. doing that with an MD file. Or checking if you have “enough” sub-titles, like at least every 300 words – probably possible with RTF and scripting, once you’ve figured out what a “sub-title” is in RTF. Very easy to do in MD with a reasonably current scripting language.
Obviously, it’s also very easy to change the formatting with a pure text format because it is separate from the text. In MD you use # to mark a heading. And then you decide in your CSS, if you want it to have in 24px bold Helvetica centered. Or in 18pt Futura left adjusted. And you specify that exactly once in your CSS. No need to go over your document and modify every occurrence of a level-one headline.
Now, you can do that nowadays with text processors like Word or Pages, when you use “formats” (or whatever they tend to call it). Which requires some discipline, in my experience. RTF offers something similar, but I have never seen an RTF editor offer that functionality. And RTF is, IMO, very much a dead end anyway: The number of native RTF editors is incredibly small, compared with editors than can work on/with MD.
All this may not be relevant for you. But it certainly is for others, and I wanted to get their point across.
This is the “between reader and writer” situation: Some formatting might make it easier to write.
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I use writing to help me think, and I cannot think in MD. If something is bold or italicized etc, I’d done it for a conceptual reason (this is more important, this is less), and I need to see it live as I type/think. With MD, having to switch between an editor and viewer introduces too much friction.
Interesting. I’ve never thought of it that way. But actually, that’s how it is for me, too.
thanks @chrillek I see what you mean. Maybe I’m an exception, since I write mainly for myself. So the writer is also the reader. No one else reads it. I format as I write. Cmd + B, the following text is bold; cmd + B, the following text is normal again. Different shortcuts for different formatting options that I can type blindly while looking at the screen. That doesn’t bother me at all. Even if I have to format something afterward, I do it (almost) exclusively with the keyboard.
Your example with the headings: I don’t need that, but I could solve it with KM or BTT with RTF.
The rest is pretty much common knowledge. MD is more versatile. RTF is actually more practical if you don’t want to convert it to another format, and if you’re not worried that RTF will soon be obsolete
Does DT fall into this category?
I use both DT and Scrivener for writing and research. My DT file for medieval English History focused on the Welsh Borders is large. It contains videos, pdf’s spreadsheets as well as web pages and images and so on. I would not like to have Scrivener try to sort through and present to me some of the searches I perform in DT when looking for odd tiny bits of data I need. To me, they are the perfect combination of applications.
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And now imagine Scrivener could do that.
Nah! I’m good with having both being excellent at what they each do. Lumping everything together into one application… where so much would not be used or understood. I like individual excellence, not having one thing trying to be all things to all people. But hey! That’s just me. And for me, I’m right. But what’s right for you is exactly that; right for you.
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Scrivener’s internal format is also RTF, FWIW.
Yes, and in fact there is nothing hidden from view in Scrivener’s internal format. If you look at the XML file that controls the project you’ll see it’s easily understood. Back in the day I had Python scripts that would create Scrivener projects without use of Scrivener itself (long story), and they never gave trouble in Scrivener.
I think the synopsis cards are plain text - but it’s been a while.
The two things that drifted me away from Scrivener were the style called “no style” and the complexity of the compile process. The “no style” style wasn’t a big deal, but the relationship between styles at writing-time versus compile-time gave me a wandering eye.
I’ll happily upgrade to version 4 when it comes out. I want to support Scrivener and I might want to return to the fold.
In the meantime, Devonthink serves the role of research folder and I found a word processor I’m very happy with that’s adept at rearranging parts and pieces as necessary in a Binder-like fashion.
Could you tell us which one?
Mellel. It’s different from everything else and their own advertising sometimes includes the statement “it’s not for everyone.”
The rumored steep learning curve isn’t bad if you first explore a couple of concepts.
In general use, it’s like any other word processor. Just type.
The Outline pane (document navigation) does what I used to do in Scrivener’s Binder. You can drag and drop scenes, or chapters with their scenes, and the Outline can be filtered by tags or by marker (category).
It’s not perfect, but it’s actively developed and getting nicer with every release. Like Scrivener, it seems to be a project with a lot of developer passion behind it.
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I understand this view and I can see why it might be useful in some cases, but I suspect @Nig and I might think along similar lines here.
I only occasionally use Scrivener. Often I’m mostly a “decide the structure in my head then dump it all out on the page” type person (I’m rarely talking about more than 5000 words and it’s science so the scope of whatever it is will be fairly tight). Sometimes though I’m struggling to decide how best to shape an article, and deciding what needs to be left “on the cutting room floor”, and I find Scrivener really good at addressing that. I can write each paragraph as a separate bit, then move them around, discard what isn’t going to make it into the article, etc. For me, if I’m stuck on the shape of the text, just making up the “digital index cards” of all the things I could say, then starting to arrange them, fixes what would’ve been writer’s block.
But I wouldn’t want all my research/ideas in the Scrivener file. The relevant DT folder might have 100 files in it. I’ve decided 20 of those are relevant to this specific piece. 10 of them might eventually be cited. I don’t need the noise of all 100 files in Scrivener. I need at most the 20 files I’m thinking about. And once I’ve discarded the ones that won’t make the final article, I still need my notes and thoughts on them ready for another day.
DT is the library with the research, but Scrivener is the desk where you collect the materials you actually need for this piece of work.
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I can’t say anything about the merits of RTF editors. It’s a format I never use. Basically text with formatting instructions. It’s all about representation and not at all about structure. Not my cup of tea.