Five contracts are more honest than “lossless”
Exact source means the Markdown text is retained. A visual contract covers the deterministic Print Proof and canonical PDF. Structural conversion maps headings, paragraphs, lists, tables, links, and other supported semantics into an editable destination. Best-effort and extractive outputs make narrower promises.
The destination decides what can survive
DOCX has styles and sections that Markdown does not. Markdown has source-level conventions that a PDF cannot expose as editable structure. EPUB readers intentionally reflow pages. Converters must map between these models rather than pretending they are interchangeable containers.
- Choose PDF when fixed visual pages are the requirement.
- Choose DOCX or ODT when recipients must edit familiar document structures.
- Choose EPUB for reflowable long-form reading.
- Keep a Markdown bundle as the portable source of record.
A conversion report is part of the output
A complete report should identify the source hash, selected profile, engine versions, mapped features, warnings, omissions, asset decisions, and artifact validation result. The workbench now provides a downloadable JSON report for a server artifact, and batch ZIPs include a manifest, diagnostics, human-readable summary, and bounded per-item reports. A destination-specific feature-by-feature mapping is still limited to what each converter actually reports; MDLoom does not invent loss data the engine cannot prove.