Quote Originally Posted by Acorn View Post
So provided you have a text editor and a image editor, you could even throw away Obsidian & MSA and still future-proof your active and legacy documentation.
Simplest idea is to just use the image editor
Many image editors can create text, vector, and raster image combinations. For example Adobe Indesign/Illustrator/Photoshop, Affinity Publisher/Designer/Photo, CorelDraw, and Xara Designer Pro+ all can do these 3 things really well. If an editor suite exists that can do all these three things, why not choose this editor suite because that way all the work can be done in a single editor suite? This was my original idea till I found out that Affinity files are compressed and text cannot easily be searched for in them directly like with plain text, there was no proper preview, and tags might not be visible in Windows Explorer. That's the reason for using the Microsoft Access index for now. But regarding the big picture, hopefully Sarif will create the equivalent of the Adobe Bridge for the Affinity Suite which could do batch decompression and searching for text plus hopefully have a true file previewer, and utilize the file tags. Adobe Bridge is really a type of Zettelkasten indexing system.

Future proofing
Your idea of future proofing is to have as much information in plain text and as little as possible in image format because text is more standardized and imaged formats are not. My idea is to have as much information in image format and as little as possible in text because pictures are worth a thousand words. Ideally I want the images and text to be all mixed up together. It's the modern way. In the old days the pictures and charts were at the end of the book but now they are alongside the text which is easier to read but this is only possible with the new desktop publishing programs. How do I make notes on which new computer to buy, I create a research report for that. Myself and people in companies are not just using these programs for taking notes like in a classroom or for the grocery list or quick ideas but many of the notes also are converted over time into reports for others to read and should be formatted properly with equation, tables, charts, illustrations, pictures, and should be able to be outputted in Adobe Acrobat format as a single file or printed. Adobe really figured this out at the beginning with the Creative Suite, that the future of all kinds of document creation should be with a suite of high end programs that all work together seamlessly. Sarif is smart and has just recently bought big time into this important concept as well with a suite of high end Affinity programs. How do you print out a report with a Word document and Adobe Illustrator illustrations? You don't, it doesn't work. How about Obsidian text and Affinity Designer illustration? It's not workable. It has to be a suite of programs. This is the future. Is this new concept future proofed? Not entirely, it's all about the converters and always has been. It keeps companies like Markzware in business.

The main problem
The main problem for my work is that programmers that work on retail type programs focus more on text than illustrations or images. Maybe most programmers actually hate graphics, this seems to be the case at Microsoft. What is called plain text still has to be encoded in some binary format just like illustrations though. The modern ASCII format dates back to 1961 but before than it was IBMs EBCDIC, and since around 1992 Unicode has become more popular. The only reason we can somehow live with these different text formats is that converters are common and most people stick with a single current standard. Next in line are the raster images, many have been around for a long time and converters are also common. If vector illustrations were considered equally important to text then illustration formats would be more standardized and converters more robust. Many years ago when computer aided drawing started being used in large companies, the US Military insisted that a single computer aided design drawing file format be used in the US, that this would be essential in time of war when work would be farmed out to various companies, the compromise was the dxf exchange format.

Which came first, CAD or word processing?
Computer aided design came before word processing. In early 1962, Itek began actively marketing the EDM computer aided design system and General Motors was rasterizing paper drawings already in 1957. It was years later in 1969 that IBM introduced their Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter and Magcard based word processing system. In the corporate world, more money is spend on individual drawing programs than with desktop word processing and desktop publishing programs.

Breaking the bonds of plain text
My project to find the ideal system for all types of documents is not only for myself. I'm a futurist. Our world presently lives in the unfortunate grip of the text based documents. It makes our whole world inefficient and drab. Microsoft Word handles complex text formatting, illustrations, and pictures so badly that people just leave out that. Unfortunately, Word has become the standard word processor in the world. Adobe Indesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop are way too expensive for most people and companies and the file sizes are huge for no apparent reason. CorelDraw is a a nice drawing program but where can you use these, they disbanded Ventura Publisher years ago so these drawings have no home in a document. Xara Designer Pro+ almost is there as a universal document format but it's not for books or complex illustrations or image editing and so could get run over. Inkscape uses the open source svg file format which can also handle a mixture of text, vector, and raster images but has never been made into a full featured program suite. But the Affinity Publisher, Designer, Photo suite can be used for almost any kind of document, from plain to very complex, it's main limitation now is automation plug ins which is being worked on. So my hope is that this Affinity program suite becomes wildly popular and this new file format turns into a standard just like docx or plain text and pushes out most of the other document file formats. It's a cruel way but that is free enterprise. In the end Microsoft allows others to use the docx format and Adobe allows others to use the pdf format, and Xara published their document specifications, so I'm hoping this or a licensing system will happen with Affinity. Both Microsoft and Adobe are still strong in spite of this but it's always a risk.

Conclusion
The big picture is that the Affinity Publisher, Designer, Photo suite is marketed mostly for desktop publishing but is perfect for almost any type of document creation including notes, research reports, letters, illustrations, images, user manuals, and books. It's file size is small and suitable for the smallest of notes. If Affinity creates an Affinity Bridge, then this suite will be totally suitable for managing large collections of files.