Minimal now supports importing and exporting across Markdown, Rich Text, HTML, PDF, plain text, and our proprietary format MNML. The following essay describes how we accomplished this system in the Swift programming language. To read about the human-centered design and how we fit this new technology into our iOS and macOS app, read the design-centric essay right here . It’s not easy to coerce one file format into another, and adding support for more and more file formats gets ever more complex. To manage this complexity, we built a cohesive system that relies on an Intermediate Representation to serve as a middleman across file formats. The Intermediate Representation (or “IR”) allows us to simply convert a given file format to and from the IR, instead of across every possible file format pair.  Intermediate Representation If we were to convert notes directly from one format to another, we’d be caught in a complex web of conversions that only gets more complex as we add more file formats.…