One pain point I had with Gemini for a while was for a use case where I needed it to output exact specific ASCII-formatting back out, such as asterisks around words meant to be italicized, for copying out. But Gemini kept auto-formatting those words as italics in its chat display, removing the asterisks (and other formattings) in the process.

Eventually I realized the "fix" was to ask it to begin its response with:

```text

...Which consistently got it to output in a plain text block. It worked, but was frustrating to have to figure out.

Hopefully this file generation stuff will help reduce that pain point.