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What about PDF/A?

Considering that every browser, OS and printer has a reader implementation, and there is a spec defined, surely this makes it on par with plain text?

You could use any document editor (Word, Pages, Apple Notes etc), and as long as it can export to PDF you are no longer tied to the note taking companies proprietary software for reading and writing. Future indexing systems will surely support PDF.

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PDF is explicitly designed as a final output format (and PDF/A is explicitly designed for archival purposes). They're good for that purpose, but it's literally like storing the digital version of a printed copy of a document rather than the source. That's fine if your only goal is preservation for reading, but preservation in a format that can be edited, converted, transformed, etc., lets out PDF as a target.

Yeh I agree, it’s write once read everywhere.

But if you need rich text and images, it seems like the only alternative to plain text.

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