I've been without MS Word for quite a few years since I switched away from Windows and honestly I haven't needed it. I took notes and wrote documents in Markdown for a while. That was alright because the syntax is easy and any text editor can read a Markdown file. Sometimes I need shareable formatting, so recently I started using HTML for all documents I intend to share, upload, or print.
The year is 2021 and I write all my formatted documents in HTML. It sounds needless but if you think about it it makes a lot of sense. HTML after all was designed to be the streaming document of choice when the web was introduced to the world. So it's tailor-made for shareable, digital documents. Over the years the specification has gotten larger, and most of the syntax required by a typical user is present.
But why bother? What are the "benefits"? Well, HTML is ubiquitous. And by that I mean literally everyone can read an HTML document because literally everyone has a web browser installed. Friends don't have Word? Use Google Docs? Use Apple Pages? Forget it. I bet you all of those folks have a web browser that was made after 1999. That means they can all read your document, either by visiting it on your site or receiving it in an email.
What's easier than reading HTML is writing it. Anyone with a text editor can do it. Heck, even those folks with Word installed can save their documents as [reasonable] HTML. And the tags aren't that hard to learn. I don't think that Markdown is an easier syntax to learn and understand. HTML's tags are only slightly more verbose and the structure is a pro, not a con. It's certainly easier than writing a document in LaTeX. I would even argue in some ways it's easier than working with a WYSIWYG editor. At least the formatting you're looking for isn't getting shuffled from menu to sub-menu.
Sometimes folks want a PDF instead. Okay, fine. For whatever reason PDFs are
the reigning document of the land. That doesn't mean you need Adobe Acrobat or
some custom setup involving
wkhtmltopdf. Or even worse, some strange LaTeX middleware via
pandoc. You don't need any of that! The best PDF reader in the
world, MuPDF, also comes with mutool.
mutool convert [options] file [pages] will convert a variety of
formats to or from a PDF. And the results look terrific going from an HTML to
a PDF. If you want, you can customize the results by writing CSS into
@media print queries. Automate the creation with a script when
you safe the underlying document. Sky's the limit!
But what about presentations or slideshows? Surely, the "minimal" solution is
to use something like Suckless' sent right? Well, you can also do
slideshows in HTML! Just a little CSS and some section and
a tags and you've got a click-able, full-browser slideshow with
images, links, titles, icons, flowcharts, embedded videos, and a printable
slide deck. And the best part is that you can instantly share online by
dropping it into a public web root. You don't have to use Google Slides or
some other third-party slide creator online that none of your friends use.
Heck, Suckless sent is just that: yet another slideshow tool that
does one thing and nobody but you has it installed. Your HTML slides are
just as plain text as a sent deck.