@JohnPhilpin The white rabbit of text manipulation beckons. Here are some real world spoilers:

Markdown can be considered a dialect of HTML with all the complications that dialect translations pose, both to human editors and the processing software employed. So always get a receipt, ie a rendered preview.

Text editors generally lean to one or the other side of the writer/programmer perspective. This informs much about their conceptualization of the work to be done and how to do it. If available, read those Our Philosophy blog posts.

Text editors also do things to pasted text that you might not expect or want and the details vary widely. Many strip out everything that isn’t plaintext, so a copy grab of a webpage will lose links and of course formatting—maybe.

Text editors have defaults for file types and related behaviors. Conversions can be surprising. If I use one of my favorite tools, DEVONThink, to convert an html page to markdown then each image is converted into a base64 encoding. Nice, didn’t lose the images. But wait—the file size went from 125kb to 10megs! Oh yeah, base64 is text!

Auto conversion of punctuation marks reduced itself to a personal global approach for me. Either I’ll let the machine “correct” everything so the words are beautiful and then I check for “programmatic” info encoded in punctuation and “re-correct” as needed, OR I enter “manually” the desired marks. I chose the former, but it’s really a question of what you can keep in your fingers.

What about character sets?…. Oh the hole goes deeper…where’s that flashlight?