Plain text

Plain text

Plain text is a form of digital data representation that is unformatted, consisting solely of text characters without any text formatting such as bold, italics, underline, or various font sizes. It is distinguishable from rich text, which allows for such formatting. Plain text files are often identified by the file extension .txt, although they can also be stored with other extensions or with no extension at all.

Characteristics

Plain text is characterized by its simplicity and versatility. It can be edited with a wide range of text editors, from simple ones like Notepad on Windows to more complex ones like Vim or Emacs on Unix or Linux systems. Due to its simplicity, plain text is often used for source code in programming languages, configuration files, and is the basis for markup languages like HTML and Markdown.

Encoding

The representation of plain text in computers is based on character encoding standards, such as ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) or Unicode. ASCII was one of the first encoding schemes to represent English characters as numbers, but it was limited in scope. Unicode is a more comprehensive standard that supports most of the world's writing systems, allowing for the representation of characters from virtually any language.

Uses

Plain text is widely used in computing due to its interoperability across different operating systems and software applications. It is commonly used for:

• Source code of computer programs
• Configuration files that control the operation of software applications
• Data exchange between different software systems
• Documentation, due to its ease of editing and version control

Advantages and Disadvantages

The primary advantage of plain text is its simplicity and compatibility with nearly all text processing and text editing software. This makes it an ideal format for data that needs to be accessible and editable across various platforms and environments.

However, the lack of formatting options can be a limitation for documents that require a specific layout or styling. For such purposes, formats like PDF or Word documents are more suitable.

See Also

• Rich text
• Text file
• Text editor
• Markup language