[seletz]

Well, that really seems to be a very hard problem to me.

Tables for instance get quite complex pretty fast -- joined cells, text alignment, etc.

As for a format which -- not plain text, though -- that handles this is rich text. It's been around for quite some time.

IMHO the problem is in the difference between presentation and data. One group of consumers want the "data" and parse it, the other group of consumers want to basically have it "look the same in this app as in the other app, and don't make my think."

[jdvh]

Tables can be arbitrarily complex, just like html, so yes a line has to be drawn somewhere. Spreadsheets and slide presentations can be copy-pasted as file attachments. That's fine.

You can't have a table look the same in every app, nor is that desirable (you'd have to embed fonts and re-create postscript). What you can have is the ability to copy-paste a table (or a bulleted list) back and forth between apps without mangling the state in the process. Rich Text intertwines semantics and style and it's not a good solution.

Most of the time you don't need the layout precision of postscript. There is a huge difference between not having any kind of tables or semantic context for text and having some that cover the 95% of daily use.