Sorry to say this is probably to a great extent a generational thing. Those who have grown up with the web and smartphones find the web and apps to be the "natural" way and appreciate that workflow, while we who used to live in a pre-smartphone or even a pre-web and/or pre-internet and/or pre-GUI world appreciate the plaintext work flow and the powers that gives.

Yet it is a bit strange that this dichotomy should make itself felt in the Pandoc community, since to the probable majority who use Markdown or the other light-weight markup formats Pandoc supports as input format Pandoc *is* a plaintext workflow, and I would expect most if not all of us to be Markdown "literate". Surely we use Pandoc because we prefer to author in the plaintext-based WYGIWYM formats rather than in a GUI/WYSIWYG? Perhaps the difference here is whether you view Markdown etc. text/markup solely as an ancillary format which should be converted to something else before being presented to the world, or also as a legitimate format for "enriched" plaintext in its own right, which has an aesthetic of its own, legitimate to use in plaintext email. (After all Markdown traces its roots to informal plaintext markup conventions of email and usenet (RIP)!)

I'm perhaps unusual in that I fiercely prefer plaintext and plaintext editors to menu-driven GUI workflows. In my case the reason for that is that I suffer from a motor disability which makes using a menu/mouse-driven GUI somewhat difficult for me — especially if the menus aren't stay-down —, yet I fully believe that I would prefer a plaintext interface (read: be a Vim user :-) regardless. Ironically I read most of my email in the Gmail app on my phone, since I have to lie down for several hours every day, and tend to use that time for activities which can be conducted on a handheld device, like reading, whether documents or email. However when *writing* email I usually switch to an on-phone plaintext editor, write what I need to write, naturally using Markdown syntax to enrich the semantics of the text, then paste the result into the Gmail composition window, foregoing any formatting controls which anyway are hard for me to use, and foregoing rendering since Pandoc anyway isn't available on my handhelds. Maybe I'm making a virtue out of a necessity, but I like to believe that it not *just* that and that I would have been a "plaintext person" anyway.

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Better --help|less than helpless