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Unfortunately, the plain text does not look good, and does not offer good control of the typesetting. At least, nearly all markdown I see is almost unreadable in its “raw” state. I’d much rather read manually formatted, monospaced, text. That way, you can use asterisks as bullets, as footnote markers and as emphasis markers all at the same time, and anyone who is familiar with normal typographic conventions will unde…
+1 Not too long ago, I used to think that Markdown was the Bee‘s knees. But having been forced to write some documentation in plaintext, I learned that plaintext is significantly more readable than raw markdown. I think one of Markdown‘s biggest sins is how it handles line breaks. Single line breaks being discarded in the output guarantees that your nicely formatted text will look worse when rendered. I understand th…
My experience has been the complete opposite. Markdown parsers that don’t discard single linebreaks (e.g. GitHub-flavored markdown) turn my nicely formatted text into a ragged mess of partially-filled lines. Or for narrow display widths, an alternating series of long and short lines.
Markdown parsers that correctly discard single linebreaks make sure that the source text (reflowed to fit a max number of characters per line) and the rendered text (reflowed to fit the display width per line) both look reasonable.