A Plain Defense For Plain Text Written by Donald Brown Wednesday December 14, 2016 Please note that some of the material found herein was taken from the web and therefore each piece taken from the web has been sited so that you can know where it came from. However, these pieces of information were placed herein so as to support this case and are not intended to be taken as plagiarism by the author but are merely provided as reference and support for this case. It is amazing what people go through just to get all that fancy formatting these days. You wouldn't believe how much money, time and effort people spend just to make their documents look perfect. However, why? What's the purpose? Well the reason why I ask this question is because nowadays, we text on our phones and we don't even worry about specialized formatting and such. We just type away as if there's no tomorrow. The recipient of the text doesn't even bat an eye over the fact that there's no styling or formatting to the information that was sent to them. They just read it and reply to it using yet more plain text. So it is totally amazing that so many people go gaga over formatting, looks and so on. You can also say this about posting on sites like Twitter and Facebook too. We write and pay absolutely little to no attention to whether the information is formatted. We just write and post away. So whether you believe it or not, we all still use plain ordinary text without any specialized formatting and we don't even bat an eyelash over it. However, in other circumstances, we go absolutely nuts if we see a file that has a bunch of text and it isn't formatted in one way or another. Go figure? However, before we continue here, you must know what a text file is and how to create one. So I have provided you with the following instructions on how to do just that. How to create a text file To create a text file or .txt file on a computer you need a text editor such as Notepad that comes pre-installed with Microsoft Windows. Note: When we refer to a "text file" we are talking about a plain text file without any text formatting (e.g., bold), images, different fonts, font sizes, etc. If you need to create a more rich document with any of these features see how to create a document. Tip: The below recommendations are for programs included with an operating system. You can also download and install a more powerful and free text editor such as Notepad++ to create, view, and edit text files. Open and use Notepad Save the file as a text file Create a new text file from the Desktop Create a text file from the Windows command line Create a text file from within a Linux shell Open and use Notepad The easiest way to create a text file in Windows is to open up the Notepad software program on your computer. The Notepad is a text editor included with Microsoft Windows. Tip: A text file is considered a plaintext file and Notepad is only capable of creating and editing plaintext files. Notepad saves any text file with a .txt file extension, which means no special formatting or fonts can be used. The Windows Notepad program can be found by following either of the steps below. 1. Click Start 2. In the Run or Search box, type Notepad and press enter. Or 1. Click Start 2. Open All Programs > Accessories, then click on the Notepad shortcut. Save the file as a text file You can also create a text file using any other word processing software program, like Microsoft Word or WordPad. When saving the file, change the file name or file type to Plain Text to save it as a text file. In many of these programs, you'll also have the option to save the file as a Rich-Text Format. Save As option After the file has been created and saved, it can also be edited using Notepad or another word processing software program. Create a new text file from the Desktop Another way to create a text file is to right-click on your Desktop screen and in the menu that appears, click New and then click Text Document. Creating a text file this way opens your default text editor with a blank text file on your Desktop. You can change the name of the file to anything you want. You can edit the file in the Notepad program or any other word processing software program, like Microsoft Word. Tip: These same steps can be used in any other location on your computer, for example, you could do this in another folder on your computer. Create a text file from the command line While in the Windows command line, you also can create a new text file in the current directory. With earlier versions of Windows, a new file of any type, including text files, could be created by using the edit command line command. Later versions of Windows removed the ability to use the edit command for this purpose. Instead, you can use the echo command at the Windows command line to create an empty text file in the current directory. An example of using this shown below. echo.>myfile.txt In the above example, you are using the echo command to create a file named "myfile.txt" in the current directory. Note that there are no spaces between "echo", the period, the greater-than sign (">"), and the file name. Another option for creating a text file from the command line is by using the start command as shown in the example below. start notepad myfile.txt In this example, you are using the start command to open Notepad with the file "myfile.txt". Assuming this file does not exist, it would be created and saved in your current directory. If the file did exist, you would be editing that file. Create a text file from within a Linux shell pico command There are several commands that can be used to create a text file in a Linux shell. The easiest command to create, view, and edit a text file or plaintext file is the pico command. To use this command, enter the below command at the prompt. pico myfile.txt After entering the above command, the editor will be opened and allow you to create a text file. When done, press Ctrl + X to exit the file. When prompted to save the file, if you want to keep the file, press "Y" for yes. Tip: The .txt file extension is not required in Linux. It is a file extension most commonly found and used with Windows. If you do not need the file to open in Windows, you can have no file extension or rename it to whatever you want. Now before we dive right into this case, I want to show you some of the many file formats that are used today for documents. Below is a very brief description of these formats. I have provided this so that you can have a bit of an understanding of each format. However, take note of the particular file format that is surrounded by the asterisks in the below article. In the original article, those asterisks weren't there. I placed them there so that you will take note of this file format. Also the web address where this particular piece of content was taken from is here below. Explanation of document Formats Below is a brief description of the many different document formats that are used to distribute information. Take note of the item surrounded by the asterisks because that's the file format that this document discusses. The below information was taken from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_e-book_formats Format: Sony media Published as: .lrf; .lrx The digital book format originally used by Sony Corporation. It is a proprietary format, but some reader software for general-purpose computers, particularly under GNU/Linux (for example, Calibre's internal viewer[2]), have the capability to read it. The LRX file extension represents a DRM encrypted eBook. More recently, Sony has converted its books from BBeB to EPUB and is now issuing new titles in EPUB. Comic Book Archive file Format: compressed images Published as: .cbr (RAR); .cbz (ZIP); .cb7 (7z); .cbt (TAR); .cba (ACE) Compiled HTML Format: Microsoft Compiled HTML Help Published as: .chm CHM format is a proprietary format based on HTML. Multiple pages and embedded graphics are distributed along with metadata as a single compressed file. The indexing is both for keywords for full text search. DAISY ñ ANSI/NISO Z39.86 Format: DAISY Published as: The Digital Accessible Information SYstem (DAISY) is an XML-based open standard maintained by the DAISY Consortium for people with print disabilities. DAISY has wide international support with features for multimedia, navigation and synchronization. A subset of the DAISY format has been adopted by law in the United States as the National Instructional Material Accessibility Standard (NIMAS), and K-12 textbooks and instructional materials are now required to be provided to students with disabilities. DAISY is already aligned with the EPUB technical standard, and is expected to fully converge with its forthcoming EPUB3 revision.[3] DjVu Format: DjVu Published as: .djvu DjVu is a format specialized for storing scanned documents. It includes advanced compressors optimized for low-color images, such as text documents. Individual files may contain one or more pages. DjVu files cannot be re-flowed. The contained page images are divided in separate layers (such as multi-color, low-resolution, background layer using lossy compression, and few-colors, high-resolution, tightly compressed foreground layer), each compressed in the best available method. The format is designed to decompress very quickly, even faster than vector-based formats. The advantage of DjVu is that it is possible to take a high-resolution scan (300ñ400 DPI), good enough for both on-screen reading and printing, and store it very efficiently. Several dozens of 300 DPI black-and-white scans can be stored in less than a megabyte. Format: DOC Microsoft Word Published as: .DOC DOC is a document file format that is directly supported by few ebook readers. Its advantages as an ebook format is that it can be easily converted to other ebook formats and it can be reflowed. It can be easily edited. Format: DOCX Microsoft Word (XML) Published as: .DOCX DOCX is a document file format that is directly supported by few ebook readers. Its advantages as an ebook format are that it can be easily converted to other ebook formats and it can be reflowed. It can be easily edited. Format: EPUB Published as: .epub File:EPUB_logo The EPUB logo The .epub or OEBPS format is a technical standard for e-books created by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF). The EPUB format has gained some popularity as a vendor-independent XML-based e-book format. The format can be read by the Kobo eReader, BlackBerry devices, Apple's iBooks app running on Macintosh computers and iOS devices, Google Books app running on Android and iOS devices, Barnes & Noble Nook, Amazon Kindle Fire,[1] Sony Reader, BeBook, Bookeen Cybook Gen3 (with firmware v2 and up), COOL-ER, Adobe Digital Editions, Lexcycle Stanza, BookGlutton, AZARDI, FBReader, Aldiko, CoolReader, Mantano Reader, Moon+ Reader, the Mozilla Firefox add-on EPUBReader, Okular and other reading apps. Adobe Digital Editions uses .epub format for its e-books, with digital rights management (DRM) protection provided through their proprietary ADEPT mechanism. The ADEPT framework and scripts have been reverse-engineered to circumvent this DRM system.[4] eReader Formerly Palm Digital Media/Peanut Press Format: Palm Media Published as: .pdb eReader is a freeware program for viewing Palm Digital Media electronic books which use the pdb format used by many Palm applications. Versions are available for Android, BlackBerry, iOS, Palm OS (not webOS), Symbian, Windows Mobile Pocket PC/Smartphone, and OS X. The reader shows text one page at a time, as paper books do. eReader supports embedded hyperlinks and images. Additionally, the Stanza application for the iPhone and iPod touch can read both encrypted and unencrypted eReader files. The program supports features like bookmarks and footnotes, enabling the user to mark any page with a bookmark and any part of the text with a footnote-like commentary. Footnotes can later be exported as a Memo document. On July 20, 2009, Barnes & Noble made an announcement[5] implying that eReader would be the company's preferred format to deliver e-books. Exactly three months later, in a press release by Adobe, it was revealed Barnes & Noble would be joining forces with the software company to standardize the EPUB and PDF eBook formats.[6][7] Barnes & Noble e-books are now sold mostly in EPUB format.[8][9][10] FictionBook (Fb2) Format: FictionBook Published as: .fb2 FictionBook[11] is a popular XML-based e-book format, supported by free readers such as FBReader, Okular, CoolReader, Bebook and STDU Viewer. The FictionBook format does not specify the appearance of a document; instead, it describes its structure and semantics. All the ebook metadata, such as the author name, title, and publisher, is also present in the ebook file. Hence the format is convenient for automatic processing, indexing, and ebook collection management. This also is convenient to store books in it for later automatic conversion into other formats. Founder Electronics Format: Apabi Reader Published as: .xeb; .ceb APABI is a format devised by Founder Electronics. It is a popular format for Chinese e-books. It can be read using the Apabi Reader software, and produced using Apabi Publisher. Both .xeb and .ceb files are encoded binary files. The Iliad e-book device includes an Apabi 'viewer'. Hypertext Markup Language Format: Hypertext Published as: .htm; .html and typically auxiliary images, js and css HTML is the markup language used for most web pages. E-books using HTML can be read using a Web browser. The specifications for the format are available without charge from the W3C. HTML adds specially marked meta-elements to otherwise plain text encoded using character sets like ASCII or UTF-8. As such, suitably formatted files can be, and sometimes are, generated by hand using a plain text editor or programmer's editor. Many HTML generator applications exist to ease this process and often require less intricate knowledge of the format details involved. HTML on its own is not a particularly efficient format to store information in, requiring more storage space for a given work than many other formats. However, several e-Book formats including the Amazon Kindle, Open eBook, Compiled HTML, Mobipocket and EPUB store each book chapter in HTML format, then use ZIP compression to compress the HTML data, images, metadata and style sheets into a single, significantly smaller, file. HTML files encompass a wide range of standards[12] and displaying HTML files correctly can be complicated. Additionally many of the features supported, such as forms, are not relevant to e-books. iBook (Apple) Format: iBook Published as: .ibooks The .ibooks format is created with the free iBooks Author ebook layout software from Apple Inc.. This proprietary format is based on the EPUB standard, with some differences in the CSS tags used in an ibooks format file, thus making it incompatible with the EPUB specification. The End-User Licensing Agreement (EULA) that comes with iBooks Author states that "If you want to charge a fee for a work that includes files in the .ibooks format generated using iBooks Author, you may only sell or distribute such work through Apple". The "through Apple" will typically be in the Apple iBooks store. The EULA further states that "This restriction does not apply to the content of such works when distributed in a form that does not include files in the .ibooks format." Therefore, Apple has not included distribution restrictions in the iBooks Author EULA for ibooks format ebooks created in iBooks Author that are made available for free, and it does not prevent authors from re-purposing the content in other ebook formats to be sold outside the iBookstore. This software currently supports import and export functionally for three formats. ibook, Plain text and PDF. The iBooks Author 2.3 and later supports importing EPUB and export EPUB 3.0.[13] IEC 62448 Format: IEC 62448 Published as: IEC 62448 is an international standard created by International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), Technical Committee 100, Technical Area 10 (Multimedia e-publishing and e-book). The current version of IEC 62448 is an umbrella standard that contains as appendices two concrete formats, XMDF of Sharp and BBeB of Sony. However, BBeB has been discontinued by Sony and the version of XMDF that is in the specification is out of date. The IEC TA10 group is discussing the next steps, and has invited the IDPF organization which has standardized EPUB to be a liaison. It is possible that the current version of EPUB and/or the forthcoming EPUB3 revision may be added to IEC 62448. Meanwhile, a number of Japanese companies have proposed that IEC standardize a proposed new Japanese-centric file format that is expected to unify DotBook of Voyager Japan and XMDF of Sharp. This new format has not been publicly disclosed as of November 2010 but it is supposed to cover basic representations for the Japanese language. Technically speaking, this revision is supposed to provide a Japanese minimum set, a Japanese extension set, and a stylesheet language. These issues were discussed in the TC100 meeting held in October 2010 but no decisions were taken besides offering the liaison status to IDPF. INF (IBM) Format: IBM & Open Source Published as: .inf IBM created this e-book format and used it extensively for OS/2 and other of its operating systems. The INF files were often digital versions of printed books that came with some bundles of OS/2 and other products. There were many other newsletters and monthly publications (e.g.: EDM/2) available in the INF format too. The advantage of INF is that it is very compact and very fast. It also supports images, reflowed text, tables and various list formats. INF files get generated by compiling the markup text files ó in the Information Presentation Facility (IPF) format ó into binary files. Originally only IBM created an INF viewer and compiler, but later open source viewers like NewView, DocView and others appeared. There is also an open source IPF compiler named WIPFC, created by the Open Watcom project. KF8 (Amazon Kindle) Format: Kindle Published as: .azw3; .azw; .kf8 With the release of the Kindle Fire reader in late 2011, Amazon.com also released Kindle Format 8, their newest file format, also known as .AZW3. The .azw3 file format supports a subset of HTML5 and CSS3 features, with some additional nonstandard features; the new data is stored within a container which can also be used to store a Mobi content document, allowing limited backwards compatibility.[14][15][16] Older Kindle e-readers use the proprietary format, AZW. It is based on the Mobipocket standard, with a slightly different serial number scheme (it uses an asterisk instead of a dollar sign) and its own DRM formatting. Because the ebooks bought on the Kindle are delivered over its wireless system called Whispernet, the user does not see the AZW files during the download process. The Kindle format is available on a variety of platforms, such as through the Kindle app for the various mobile device platforms. Microsoft LIT Format: Microsoft Reader Published as: .lit DRM-protected LIT files are only readable in the proprietary Microsoft Reader program, as the .LIT format, otherwise similar to Microsoft's CHM format, includes Digital Rights Management features. Other third party readers, such as Lexcycle Stanza, can read unprotected LIT files. The Microsoft Reader uses patented ClearType display technology. In Reader navigation works with a keyboard, mouse, stylus, or through electronic bookmarks. The Catalog Library records reader books in a personalized "home page", and books are displayed with ClearType to improve readability. A user can add annotations and notes to any page, create large-print e-books with a single command, or create free-form drawings on the reader pages. A built-in dictionary allows the user to look up words. In August 2011, Microsoft announced they were discontinuing both Microsoft Reader and the use of the .lit format for ebooks[17] at the end of August 2012, and ending sales of the format on November 8, 2011.[18] Mobipocket Format: Mobipocket Published as: .prc; .mobi The Mobipocket e-book format is based on the Open eBook standard using XHTML and can include JavaScript and frames. It also supports native SQL queries to be used with embedded databases. There is a corresponding e-book reader. The Mobipocket Reader has a home page library. Readers can add blank pages in any part of a book and add free-hand drawings. Annotations ñ highlights, bookmarks, corrections, notes, and drawings ñ can be applied, organized, and recalled from a single location. Images are converted to GIF format and have a maximum size of 64K,[19] sufficient for mobile phones with small screens, but rather restrictive for newer gadgets. Mobipocket Reader has electronic bookmarks, and a built-in dictionary. The reader has a full screen mode for reading and support for many PDAs, Communicators, and Smartphones. Mobipocket products support most Windows, Symbian, BlackBerry and Palm operating systems, but not the Android platform. Using WINE, the reader works under Linux or Mac OS X. Third-party applications like Okular and FBReader can also be used under Linux or Mac OS X, but they work only with unencrypted files. The Amazon Kindle's AZW format is basically just the Mobipocket format with a slightly different serial number scheme (it uses an asterisk instead of a dollar sign), and .prc publications can be read directly on the Kindle. The Kindle AZW format also lacks some Mobipocket features such as JavaScript.[20] Amazon has developed an .epub to .mobi converter called KindleGen,[21] and it supports IDPF 1.0 and IDPF 2.0 EPUB format. Multimedia eBooks Format: Eveda Published as: .exe or .html A multimedia ebook is media and book content that utilizes a combination of different book content formats. The term can be used as a noun (a medium with multiple content formats) or as an adjective describing a medium as having multiple content formats. The "multimedia ebook" term is used in contrast to media which only utilize traditional forms of printed or text books. Multimedia ebooks include a combination of text, audio, images, video, or interactive content formats. Much like how a traditional book can contain images to help the text tell a story, a multimedia ebook can contain other elements not formerly possible to help tell the story. With the advent of more widespread tablet-like computers, such as the smartphone, some publishing houses are planning to make multimedia ebooks, such as Penguin.[22] Newton eBook Format: Newton eBook Published as: .pkg Commonly known as an Apple Newton book; a single Newton package file can contain multiple books (for example, the three books of a trilogy might be packaged together). All systems running the Newton operating system (the most common include the Newton MessagePads, eMates, Siemens Secretary Stations, Motorola Marcos, Digital Ocean Seahorses and Tarpons) have built-in support for viewing Newton books. The Newton package format was released to the public by Newton, Inc. prior to that company's absorption into Apple Computer. The format is thus arguably open and various people have written readers for it (writing a Newton book converter has even been assigned as a university-level class project[23]). Newton books have no support for DRM or encryption. They do support internal links, potentially multiple tables of contents and indexes, embedded gray scale images, and even some scripting capability (for example, it's possible to make a book in which the reader can influence the outcome).[24] Newton books utilize Unicode and are thus available in numerous languages. An individual Newton book may actually contain multiple views representing the same content in different ways (such as for different screen resolutions). Open Electronic Package Format: Open eBook Published as: .opf OPF is an XML-based e-book format created by E-Book Systems; it has been superseded by the EPUB electronic publication standard. Portable Document Format Format: Portable Document Format Published as: .pdf Invented by Adobe Systems, and first released in 1993, PDF became ISO 32000 in 2008. The format was developed to provide a platform-independent means of exchanging fixed-layout documents. Derived from PostScript, but without language features like loops, PDF adds support for features such as compression, passwords, semantic structures and DRM. Because PDF documents can easily be viewed and printed by users on a variety of computer platforms, they are very common on the World Wide Web and in document management systems worldwide. The current PDF specification, ISO 32000-1:2008, is available from ISO's website, and under special arrangement, without charge from Adobe.[25] Because the format is designed to reproduce fixed-layout pages, re-flowing text to fit mobile device and e-book reader screens has traditionally been problematic. This limitation was addressed in 2001 with the release of PDF Reference 1.5 and "Tagged PDF",[26] but 3rd party support for this feature was limited until the release of PDF/UA in 2012. Many products support creating and reading PDF files, such as Adobe Acrobat, PDFCreator and OpenOffice.org, and several programming libraries such as iText and FOP. Third party viewers such as xpdf and Nitro PDF are also available. Mac OS X has built-in PDF support, both for creation as part of the printing system and for display using the built-in Preview application. PDF files are supported by almost all modern e-book readers, tablets and smartphones. However, PDF reflow based on Tagged PDF, as opposed to re-flow based on the actual sequence of objects in the content-stream, is not yet commonly supported on mobile devices. Such Re-flow options as may exist are usually found under "view" options, and may be called "word-wrap". Plain text files ***Format:*** text Published as: .txt The first e-books in history were in plain text (.txt) format, supplied for free by the Project Gutenberg community, but the format itself existed before the e-book era. The plain text format doesn't support digital rights management (DRM) or formatting options (such as different fonts, graphics or colors), but it has excellent portability as it is the simplest e-book encoding possible as a plain text file contains only ASCII or Unicode text (text files with UTF-8 or UTF-16 encoding are also popular for languages other than English). Almost all operating systems can read ASCII text files (e.g. Unix, Macintosh, Microsoft Windows, DOS and other systems) and newer operating systems support Unicode text files as well. The only potential for portability problems of ASCII text files is that operating systems differ in their preferred line ending convention and their interpretation of values outside the ASCII range (their character encoding). Conversion of files from one to another line-ending convention is easy with free software. DOS and Windows uses CRLF, Unix and Apple's OS X use LF, Mac OS up to and including OS 9 uses CR. By convention, lines are often broken to fit into 80 characters, a legacy of older terminals and consoles. Alternately, each paragraph may be a single line. The size in bytes of a text file is simply the number of characters, including spaces, and with a new line counting for 1 or 2. For example, the Bible, which is approximately 800,000 words, is about 4 MB.[27] Plucker Format: Plucker Published as: .pdb Plucker is an Open Source free mobile and desktop e-book reader application with its own associated file format and software to automatically generate Plucker files from text, PDF, HTML, or other document format files, web sites or RSS feeds. The format is public and well-documented. Free readers are available for all kinds of desktop computers and many PDAs. PostScript Format: PostScript Published as: .ps PostScript is a page description language used in the electronic and desktop publishing areas for defining the contents and layout of a printed page, which can be used by a rendering program to assemble and create the actual output bitmap. Many office printers directly support interpreting PostScript and printing the result. As a result, the format also sees wide use in the Unix world. RTF Format: Rich Text Format Published as: .rtf Rich Text Format is a document file format that is supported by many ebook readers. Its advantages as an ebook format is that it is widely supported, and it can be reflowed. It can be easily edited. It can be easily converted to other ebook formats, increasing its support. SSReader Format: SSReader Published as: .pdg The digital book format used by a popular digital library company ???????[28] in China. It is a proprietary raster image compression and binding format, with reading time OCR plug-in modules. The company scanned a huge number of Chinese books in the China National Library and this becomes the major stock of their service. The detailed format is not published. There are also some other commercial e-book formats used in Chinese digital libraries. Text Encoding Initiative Format: TEI Lite Published as: .xml TEI Lite is the most popular of the TEI-based (and thus XML-based or SGML-based) electronic text formats. TomeRaider Format: TomeRaider Published as: .tr2; .tr3 The TomeRaider e-book format is a proprietary format. There are versions of TomeRaider for Windows, Windows Mobile (aka Pocket PC), Palm, Symbian and iPhone. Several Wikipedias are available as TomeRaider files with all articles unabridged, some even with nearly all images. Capabilities of the TomeRaider3 e-book reader vary considerably per platform: the Windows and Windows Mobile editions support full HTML and CSS. The Palm edition supports limited HTML (e.g., no tables, no fonts), and CSS support is missing. For Symbian there is only the older TomeRaider2 format, which does not render images or offer category search facilities. Despite these differences any TomeRaider e-book can be browsed on all supported platforms. The Tomeraider website[29] claims to have over 4000 e-books available, including free versions of the Internet Movie Database and Wikipedia. Open XML Paper Specification Format: OpenXPS Published as: .oxps, .xps Open XML Paper Specification (also referred to as OpenXPS) is an open specification for a page description language and a fixed-document format. Microsoft developed it as the XML Paper Specification (XPS). In June 2009, Ecma International adopted it as international standard ECMA-388.[30] The format is intentionally restricted to sequences of: Glyphs (a fixed run of text), Paths (a geometry that can be filled, or stroked, by a brush), and Brushes (a description of a shaped brush used to in rendering paths). This reduces the possibility of inadvertent introduction of malicious content and simplifies the implementation of compatible renderers. Comparison tables Features Format Filename extension DRM support Image support Table support Sound support Interactivity support Word wrap support Open standard Embedded annotation support Book- marking Video support Comic Book Archive .cbr, .cbz, .cb7, .cbt, .cba . As you can see from the info above, there are many different file formats all with their proprietary readers and supported hardware and software. However, the only file format that isn't supported by any particular software or hardware configuration is the plain text format which is the item surrounded by asterisks above. Out of all the file formats mentioned , only plain text will withstand the true test of time because these other formats in time will go by the wayside, and newer formats will replace them as a result. Okay, now we're going to move forward and have a look at some rather strong cases for why you should use plain text files instead of word processing file formats. The individuals who plead these cases are avid creators and users of plain text files so that's why their cases were added here so that you can see their defense for the file format. Take the case study here below involving an individual from Lifehacker who uses plain text. Whoever this individual is, they're definitely a firm believer in using plain text over word processing documents. Looking back through my old files, I'm amazed to see how many word processors Iíve used over the years. Iíve got document files in formats ranging from MacWrite to Pages and everything in between. The problem is, a lot of those old files are useless to me now: None of my current word processors can read them. Thatís a shame; some of those old words were pretty good. Although modern word processing programs can do some amazing thingsóadding charts, tables, and images, applying sophisticated formattingóthereís one thing they canít do: Guarantee that the words I write today will be readable ten years from now. Thatís just one of the reasons I prefer to work in plain text: Itís timeless. My grandchildren will be able to read a text file I create today, long after anybody can remember what the heck a .dotx file is. But thatís not plain textís only advantage. Text files are multi-platform: I can bounce them among my Mac, iPad, iPhone, and Windows PC without breaking a sweat. I can also drop text into any number of programs for further processing. For these and other reasons, I now write everythingóincluding this storyóin plain-text format. Hereís how it works for me. Starting on the desktop I started writing this article on my Mac in Byword. Sure, every Mac ships with Appleís own TextEdit, and itís certainly an easy way to work with text. But I prefer Byword. For one thing, it has a bit more polish than TextEdit. Also, it has baked-in support for Markdown, which makes it easy to add basic formatting and convert text to other formats. Byword exports textóin Markdown or notóto HTML, PDF, RTF, Word, and Latex formats. Moreover, Byword displays the word count, uses Lionís full screen mode, and just looks good on the screen. There are more advanced text editors available. For big writing projects, I use Scrivener (.) (still in plain-text format). But for most writing on my Mac, Byword just works for me. When I got about halfway through the story, I copied it into nvALT as a new note. nvALT is an impressive little text editor in its own right; it searches and edits text brilliantly. With it, I can create new text notes with just a few keystrokes. Because Iím working in plain text, I can copy whatever I've written between nvALT and Byword easily, with none of the formatting train wrecks you can get with moving word processing text between applications. Moving to the cloud In this case, I wanted to use nvALT because it syncs with Simplenote (.). Simplenote is absurdly useful for plain-text writers: Itís a bare bones text editor for iOS plus an online syncing service. The app lets me securely upload and download text files, search through my entire database of notes, and see prior versions of them (much like Lionís new Versions). Because the data is on the Web, the latest versions of my files are always available from almost anywhere. In addition to viewing my data on Simplenoteís own website or with Simplenoteís own iOS app, I can also view and edit my notes using one of the many Simplenote-compatible text editors. Theyíre available on almost every platform (including iOS, Android, and Windows, as well as the Mac). nvALT is my favorite Simplenote client on the Mac, but there are plenty of others. SimpleNote is free but you can purchase a premium subscription for $20 per year that removes ads and provides some additional features, including Dropbox syncing. Syncing Simplenote text files with a Dropbox folder makes a lot of sense, particularly if you want to use an editor that doesnít have built-in Simplenote support; there are plenty of Dropbox-compatible editors for the iPad. (My current favorite is Notesy.) With nvALT and Simplenote, I'm always working with the most current version, no matter where I am or what hardware I'm using. Those tools give me the reckless freedom to write anywhere. Having synced this story to Simplenote, I wrote the rest of it in the Simplenote iPad app while enjoying a taco at a nearby restaurant. I then proofread the whole thing on my iPhone while drinking tea the next morning, again with Simplenote. Finally, I went to my iMac and copied the text from nvALT back into Byword so I could give it one final proofread before submitting. If I were going to print this article on paper, I would have copied the final text into Pages to apply styles and formatting before sending my precious text into the world. But I find I print less these days and share electronically a lot more. For the latter, text is best. Even better, if 50 years from now I want to read these words again while riding in my hover car, Iíll be able to open the file on my iPhone 23. After all, itís just plain text. One of the many reasons why people don't resort to using plain text has to do with security issues. You can't really protect the text from tamporing and such, and even though it is a standard that all equipment can use, the merre fact that it is just plain text without any formatting just isn't justifiable to use for things like e-books and such. Therefore that's why we have specialized e-book readers that handle those fancy e-book formats and such. It makes them money. However, in the end, plain text will always win out because after a certain number of years, those fancy formats will be long gone and you will not be able to read them any more. So there goes all that money, time and effort put into that particular project but then what? Well I guess yet another fancy text format will come along that will become the defacto standard just to make somebody else a boatload of money. Because after all, this is nothing but a money thing. However, even after that new format is then long gone, guess what still remains? You guessed it, plain text. When e-book readers first came onto the market, not very many people bought them, but if you were one of those who did end up buying one, then you also know the terrible headaches that you had with dealing with file formats and all that stupid security junk. What I mean by that is, that back in the earlier days of e-readers, each e-reader had its own native format and because of that, books couldn't be swapped from one device to another. So if your e-reader broke down, you either had to buy another one of the same type, or you had to go to something else and hope and prey that your book that you wanted to read was in that particular device's native format. However, more than likely, your book probably didn't make it onto the other device's best seller's list just yet. Too bad. However, if e-readers were based off of just plain text, then this wouldn't be a real problem. However, here again, it is all a money issue and it is also tied up in copywrights and so on. However, how many people do you know who would really violate a copywright? Other than sharing the book with their friends and such, so as long as the main content of the book wasn't changed, where's the problem? I always tell people this so here goes. "If it can be watched, read or heard, then it can be copied no mattter how secure the item is". So what I am saying here is that all that money put into making sure that the book can't be copied doesn't really stop someone from copying it even if the individual simply re-wrote the material into plain text and then destributed it. It is at that point that all that copy protection just went out the window. The only sure fire way to secure something is to not let it be watched, heard, or read. Now I am in no way promoting copywright violation because copywrights do have their place. They do show ownership of the work by someone and therefore, we should respect that. All that I am saying here is that all these elaborate schemes of spending tons and tons of money trying to protect the work is actually too much because the majority of people aren't interested in copywright infrengement. They just want to get the information that they're seeking. So what about word processors? Well take Microsoft Word for example. Even today's version of Word can't open up some of it's own files due to the fact that those particular file formats have been discontinued. So why all the newer file formats in Microsoft Word? What's the real difference between a DOC file and a DOCX file? Well here again, it all boils down to money. However, I am sure that you have heard the phrase, "If it isn't broke, then don't fix it". There's no difference in how a DOC file is displayed over a DOCX file is displayed on the screen. They both look the same. However, like was mentioned, even those file formats will go by the wayside and yet plain text will still remain as the common denominator in written communication. It will still traverse all computer platforms and it will still be able to be read on all future devices no matter how complex they become. Its just that simple. Here's yet another exerpt from Lifehacker Plain text has long been a favorite here at Lifehacker, but over the years most people have moved away from it in favor of specialized to-do apps, notes apps, writing apps, or whatever else. I still use plain text for just about everything, but never thought much about why I do. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that snazzy features aside, plain text is still king for portability and simplicity. When it comes to keeping track of all your text and to-do lists, there's no shortage of appsÖ Weíve talked about the value of plain text to-do lists before. The short of it is simple: any computer can read plain, simple text. A .txt file is totally portable, and there are no bells, no whistles, no proprietary software, and no fancy formatting options. It is one of the simplest files a computer can create, and any computeróalongside a variety of appsócan read it. Over the years, tons of productivity software tried to replace it, and yet, from snarky to-do apps to big budget notes apps, nothingís beaten plain text for me. Plain Text Forces Me to Keep Things Simple I love organizing things. I love formatting things. I love outlining, keywording, and listing things. This is often a useful character trait, but itís just as often a distraction and utterly useless when it comes to writing, setting to-dos, and taking notes. Give me a to-do app with tags, color choices, and hierarchies, and Iíll give you an hour of my time to organize something as simple as a grocery shopping list. Give me multiple notebooks for my notes and Iíll give you days of my life building an organization system. I will then go on to not actually use any of those systems. Even though I love organization and gravitate to it in many facets of my life, itís not important to me with stuff like basic notes or to-dos. What is important is simplicity. I want to quickly open an app, write down what I need to, then close it without thinking about what tag it should get, what formating to add, or whatever else. Just give me an empty sheet of paper and a blinking text icon. How do I find what Iím looking for without those organization tricks? Remember, this is plain text. Itís a simple file format. Control + F, type in a couple of words into a search bar, either in the app or in Spotlight on a Mac, and it brings up exactly what I need. Of course, I have some higher level organization too. All my Lifehacker post ideas are in one file. To-dos in another. Fiction ideas in another. You get the point. Itís simple, yet a little chaotic, which is exactly what I like about it. I Can Stuff All My Creative Ideas In One Place One thing thatís really kept me on plain text is the fact I can use it for everything I want to. I donít have to divide my brain space into different apps or services. Plain text is as analogous to a single small creative notebook as software can get. Even when youíre using an app like ToDo.txt, Sublime Text, or Simplenote to manage plain text files, things get messy. Your system will never be as organized as it could be with the likes of Evernote. And thatís exactly why I love it. I have todayís to-dos right next to an idea for a feature film Iíll never write. I have notes on making a desk from three years ago snuggling up next to a text file filled with weird dreams. My list of ideas for Lifehacker articles is right next to some structural notes about a novel. Every idea Iíve had, dumb, smart, insane, and whatever else is together in a single folder, accessible as one giant lump of text. Every day I see all of it, and every day I think about much of it, even when I donít have to. Because of this, my brainís constantly churning through ideas good and bad. Abandoned ideas and completed ones live in the same space. Because of that I can see what works, what doesnít, and what I just havenít figured out how to do yet. This is great for me. When my stupid idea for a video game sits right next to my grocery list, everything feels doable. Every idea is worth thinking about, and the ideas are worth thinking about multiple times, even if I canít figure out what to do with them at first. Of course, you donít have to go all in like that. Most people probably find this type of system overwhelming, but the beauty of plain text is how easy it is to solve that kind of problem. You can create folders or use an app that supports tagging, and just like that, youíre organized without a lot trouble. Plain Text Will Never Require a Subscription, Lock Away Features, or Go Out of Business Plain text is ubiquitous. It works on every operating system, and on every mobile device, regardless of who makes it. A wide variety of apps can read it. Youíll never run into file compatibility errors. You can take what you write from one app to another without a thought. This matters because the tech industry likes to remind us that nothing lasts forever. We see apps shut down all the time. They add in a subscription fee. They lock that one feature you want behind a paywall. Itís annoying, and if youíre invested in an app, whether itís a notes app or a to-do app, youíre often forced to pay out the nose for a bunch of features you donít want. Plain text doesnít suffer this problem because itís universally readable across platforms, not to mention a bedrock of well, computing as we know it. Likewise, plain text will never change. Where an app might get updated with new features and a new user interface, plain text is pretty much always plain text. I will never open up an app to find a new design that I hate, or a new user experience I have to learn. Text editors may change, but thereíll always be another, and theyíll never all go subscription-only. This is really important to me. I use plain text every single day for simple tasks. I donít need anything getting in the way of me capturing text as quickly as possible. Where Iíve Abandoned Plain Text Of course, keeping everything in plain text, even with a decent management app like Simplenote, gets a little crazy. Iíve moved away from plain text in favor of apps in a couple places to help simplify things. The big move for me was with recipes. Iíve replaced a ton of randomly shackled together ingredients in a semi-organized text file with the recipe manager Paprika. Recipe management is a chore with plain text, and Paprika made it enjoyable. Similarly, any public, long form writing I do goes through the likes of Google Docs, Microsoft Word, or Ulysses (which is really just plain text, slightly enhanced), depending on whatís needed. Even then, Iíll often still start with plain text to get the words onto the page before sending it over to another app for formatting and editing. Writing in a format like Markdown is great for this. You can write in plain text, add some simple formatting, and you then export that plain text file to a variety of rich text formats, including HTML, PDF, or DOC. There are also tasks I used to use plain text for that have just become unnecessary over the years. With services like Spotify, I donít need to keep a list of music recommendations anymore. Likewise, Amazon wish lists let me ditch the book, comic, game, movie, and whatever else recommendations I used to keep in a single plain text file in favor of nicely organized shopping lists. So, nowadays, my plain text files are all related to creative endeavors alongside my to-do lists. Itís a mishmash of stuff that someone else could probably organize better, but I like that these things live together in the same apps. It makes it feel like even my craziest ideas are a little more achievable. Plain Text Emails Are Better Than Formatted Ones You would think that because people are on the Internet reading web pages and such that it would be suffice to say that HTML emails would get the same rating as web pages do. However, what's shocking is that even though some emails are written in full-blown HTML, their open rates are greatly decreased. So why is that? Well email is not one of those platforms where web elements such as HTML really work well in. Believe it or not, plain text emails have a much higher delivery rate than their HTML counterparts do. So why is that? Well for one thing, not all email clients can open HTML emails. However, all of them can open plain text emails so that's the biggest reason why this is the case. Not only that, but plain text emails delivered to someone's inbox take up far less space than do plain text emails and therefore, more information can be passed along. Another reason why HTML doesn't go over well inside email is because email is meant to be glanced over whereas web pages are designed for more extensive reading. When you think about it, people who work in professional environments don't spend much time reading long email messages. They tend toskim through picking out only the important parts and then deleting the message. HTML based emails require much more attention than do their plain text counterparts. Not only that, but the loading time for a plain text email is much faster in the client than an HTML email is. This in turn helps to save time in the professional environment. More Reasons To Use Plain Text Why Plain Text Will Boost Your Productivity as a Writer Published on: Jun 19, 2015 by Rebekka in Do You Write? Plain Text Productivity Plain text writing may sound like a complicated concept to someone who grew up with text processors. But it is actually what writers did before text processors even existed: sit down in front of a typewriter and type words. When preparing for print, the text of a manuscript was then marked up by hand to indicate what typeface, style, size etc. should be applied by the typesetter. When text processors first were invented, they seemed to considerably empower writers, who were now able to format their texts right away. Over the years, these programs constantly evolved and gained more and more functionality. The problem is that meanwhile their original purpose faded into the background: writing. Authors can choose to return to WordStar ñ which was the was the very first WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor ñ to escape the bloat of modern text processors. Or they can write plain text. The concept of writing in plain text gained many fans with the rise of blogging, but I think many of its benefits apply to any kind of writing. Here are some ways how plain text writing can help to boost your productivity. Simplify Your Writing Plain text writing (and marking up text elements for later formatting) is simple. If youíve been socialized in Word (like me), you may disagree at first. But I believe that if you try plain text writing, youíre likely to change your mind and come to enjoy its purity and simplicity. As for myself, I think now that text processors are actually cumbersome, and many writers just got so used to this fact that they donít question it anymore. Be (Much!) Less Distracted Whenever I open Microsoft Word for some reason (last time was for proofreading the doctoral thesis of a friend who doesnít own a Mac), I feel somehow desoriented by all these buttons and menus. Iím aware that one can do exciting things with text processors ñ design an event invitation, for example, or add a diagram. But what when all you want to do is write? Some decisions to take: Word Some decisions to take: Word Letís say Iím up to crafting a blogpost (a marketing strategy, an academic paper, whatever). I donít feel that text processors are helping me in any way with that task. On the contrary, they seem designed to redirect my attention, continuously asking me questions: Is Cambria too ordinary as a font, are the margins too narrow? Should I try one of these fancy designs, and what does this button actually do? How can I avoid the page to break only two text lines after the headline? And so on. Focus on Your Text To avoid getting distracted by these permanently demanded decisions is an exercise in self-discipline. With plain text, on the the other hand, you need to focus on what really counts: Your findings. Your thoughts. Your stories. Plus: As long as youíre writing, the question of the most fitting typeface for your subhead or footnote is not relevant at all. Some space to fill with words: Ulysses Some space to fill with words: Ulysses Separate Writing from Formatting So writing plain text means to separate writing from formatting for the sake of productivity. The essential structural elements of a text are marked up while writing: You can write headings of various levels, add emphasis, add lists and more. What you canít do: Tweak margins, or choose your first order headings to be 24 pt, and red-colored. All the layout tasks that have nothing to do with the content youíre trying to compose. Take care of layout later. This first instance should be about writing, and writing only. Write Faster Ulysses markup bar The Ulysses markup bar ñ more than a cheat sheet: You can also apply any of the tags by clicking on them. Youíll need only a small number of memorable signs to mark up the structural elements of a text while writing. Once you know them by heart, you can just type away, without reaching for the mouse and twiddling with fancy formatting menus. It would be a good idea to have a cheat sheet at hand while learning the markup. With Ulysses, itís built right in. Just click the markup button in the toolbar to bring up the list of all available tags, and tear it off to leave it open while writing. It wonít take long until marking up a headline will come to you as natural as placing an exclamation mark. Questions like ìunderlined or set in italic?î wonít bother you anymore. Save Time When Publishing So youíve successively written a text. Whatís next? ï You publish a blogpost. ï You add it to the content management system of a website. ï You create an e-book and publish with Amazon, Nook or iBooks. ï You convert it to PDF and pass it over to your colleagues for their opinion. ï Itís for a print publication. You send it to the graphic designer, and he uses InDesign to produce a leaflet. ï Itís a diary, or notes-to-self, not meant to be read by anyone but yourself: The text remains where it is. ï Itís a term paper for university: You export to formatted text, print and submit to your professor. (t.b.c.) Thereís a lot of things you can do with texts. For many of them, using a text processor isnít mandatory. On the contrary, sometimes formatting can even get in your way and you have to remove it manually. And even if it actually is a Word document that you want (or must) have in the end: Even then youíll probably be more productive when you separate writing and formatting. Repurpose Your Text If you want to publish your text more than once, but in different formats, plain text is very effective ñ thanks to the use of markup, you can easily convert it. Ulysses, as an example, can use one and the same text to create a formatted PDF, an e-book or standard HTML ñ with just a few clicks. So, if you havenít tried it yet, I hope this article inspired you to explore the benefits of plain text writing and find the editor that fits you best. Here's yet another supporter of plain text. Why Plain Text Will Boost Your Productivity as a Writer Published on: Jun 19, 2015 by Rebekka in Do You Write? Plain Text Productivity For a while now, I've been an advocate of plain text files for those who primarily write for the web. And like many who attempt to explain their benefits, every time I do, I come of sounding like a crazy person. Later today, I will be featured in an episode of Jason Konopinski's ["Riffing on Writing" podcast](http://www.jasonkonopinski.com/riffing-on-writing-podcast/) where we talk about geeky writing workflows. While I can't say for certain, I'm fairly certain that early on in the episode I come off like a geeky raving madman. In order to attempt to prove that I'm not insane (likely a futile endeavor), I wanted to try and clarify why I believe plain text files to be a better way to create words for the web. ## What is Plain Text? Plain text files are exactly they says on the tin, a file that only includes your text with no additional formatting. You can open these files in any text editor or word processor and they will look the same. This changes the minute you start getting into basic formatting and proprietary files such as Microsoft Word's DOCX, or even basic, rich-text formatting such as bold and italics can limit your options. As David Sparks pointed out in his [Macworld article on plain text](http://www.macworld.com/article/1161549/forget_fancy_formatting_why_plain_text_is_best.html): > Although modern word processing programs can do some amazing thingsóadding charts, tables, and images, applying sophisticated formattingóthereís one thing they canít do: Guarantee that the words I write today will be readable ten years from now. Anyone who has ever attempted to open a new Microsoft Word file in an old copy of the application knows the limitations of file formats, but what you may not know is that in most cases this limitation is self imposed and unnecessary.. ## Text Editor vs. Word Processor. A big part of the problem is that we're often using the wrong default tool to create our words. When ready to write, the majority of computer users will open a word processor like Microsoft Word or Apple's Pages rather than a text editor like Notepad on Windows or Text Edit on the Mac. We do this even if we're simply drafting an email or jotting down notes to ourselves. The problem actually lies in the name. A word processor, while capable of being used for the creation of words, is actually optimized for formatting text in order to be printed or read. Whereas a text editor is more focused the creation and editing of your words. ## Plain Text vs. Formatted Text Since the majority of us often use a standard font, size and spacing on our printed documents or PDFs and have a set design on our websites, a word processor is often overkill. They can be useful for creating beautifully formatted documents, but for everyday use, they're more of a habit than a benefit. By switching to plain text, you immediately see the benefits. * **Plain Text is Portable** - The files are smaller allowing for large libraries of text files to move quickly from a folder in the cloud (e.g. Dropbox or iCloud) to your device of choice. They also take up far less room on your hard drive than more robust file formats. * **Plain Text is Flexible** - Mac user? Windows user? iOS? Android? Palm? Word? Pages? It doesn't matter what you chose to use. There is no file incompatibility when it comes to plain text and because of that there's no broken formatting or files that cannot be opened. * **Plain Text is Ubiquitous** - This combination of portability and flexibility ensures that you will always have access to all of your words, wherever you are on whatever device you find yourself working on in a format that can be compactly stored both on your device and in the cloud. ## Formatting and Markdown Right about now, you might be interested. But you're probably worried about the same thing I was at first: basic formatting. All of this sounds great, but we still need to be able to bold and italicize text. We need to be able to create headers, block quotes, lists. And we need to do so in a way that our boss, co-workers and friends can read. When writing for the web, we need to create links and we need to get it all in a format that works on any website.. This is where Markdown comes in. According to John Gruber, the creator of [Markdown](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/): > Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML). In other words, it allows you to write entirely in plain text in a way that can easily be exported into something formatted. For those of you who saw the word HTML and freaked out, I assure you, Markdown is easy to learn and can now be used to create more than just HTML for the web. I do not know a line of code and mastered the basics in about an hour. Markdown is intentionally limited, keeping things down to the basics that writers need and use.. Hopefully I sound mildly less insane and perhaps even have you considering plain text for yourself. Ok, we're now going to switch gears here and talk about resumes. Now I know what you're thinking right about now. Resumes in plain text? Are you dead serious? Nobody would half a brain would even look at those. Well believe it or not, employers do, and here's how you can craft a resume in plain text and still have it look great! Plain Text Resumes: How to Make Them a Little Less Ugly plain text resumes stink, but you still need one At some point in your job hunt, you'll probably be asked to submit a resume as plain text (aka, just text or ASCII text). When this happens, you'll have to convert your handsome, professional-looking resume into a bare-bones document with no formatting. Just line after line of ugly, typewriter-ish text. Bleh. Although a.text resume can't have any bling, with a little keyboard creativity, you can at least give it some zing. Why would anyone ask for a plain text resume, when a formatted resume is so much more attractive and easier to read? Blame technology. Many larger companies scan resumes into a database for sorting and storage, and scanners don't like formatting. Some organizations also prohibit opening email attachments for fear of viruses; they want plain text in the body of the email. And posting your resume on an online job board usually requires plain text. Making a resume look good in plain text is challenging, but not impossible. Some mild creativity with your keyboard can make your text resume more attractive and more readable, without creating problems on the recipient's end. Formatting You CANNOT Use in a Plain Text Document: ï NO text effects such as bold, italics, underlining, centering, etc. ï NO special characters or bullets (you can't use the Ctrl or Alt key, or the Apple key on a Mac). ï NO tabbed indents (don't use the Tab key at all). ï NO lines more than about six inches long (that's about 60 characters, in 10-pt type).ó use the Enter key to create line breaks where necessary. Formatting You CAN Use in a Plain Text Document: ï Any basic keyboard character.ó letter, number, symbol, or punctuation mark ó in upper or lower case. ï Line breaks to create spacing (hit the Enter key two or more times). ï ALL CAPS FOR EMPHASIS. ï Rows of one character to create a "line" (===== or ~~~~~) ï Bullet substitutes such as plus signs (+), asterisks (*), or hyphens (-) combined with spacebar indenting. EXAMPLES: Here is an excerpt from a plain text resume as it might normally appear: Pat Jobseeker 123 Main Street Yourtown, ST 12345 (555) 444-3333 patjobseeker@email.com Summary of Qualifications More than 3 years supervisory experience leading teams of up to 12 retail associates Consistent record of 7 to 8% sales growth in each of the past 5 quarters Earned top regional sales award for 2006 and 2007 Work History Sept 2004 - Present Retail Supervisor Germani's Emporium, Yourtown, ST Spearheaded team-based sales initiative in upscale men's clothing store that produced unprecedented quarterly revenue increases Not so readable, eh? Below is the same plain text resume with some keyboard-created "zing." All I did was enter line breaks to separate the sections; add rows of squiggles (~) and all CAPS to draw attention to the headings; and type asterisks (*) followed by two spaces to simulate bullets. For two-line bullet items, I inserted a line break at the end of Line 1, and hit the spacebar three times to indent the second line. Pat Jobseeker 123 Main Street Yourtown, ST 12345. (555) 444-3333. patjobseeker@email.com ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ SUMMARY OF QUALIFICATIONS ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ *. Retail sales professional with more than 3 years of supervisory ... experience hiring, training, and leading up to 20 associates *. Consistent record of 7 to 8% sales growth for past 5 quarters ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ WORK HISTORY ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Sept 2004 - Present RETAIL SUPERVISOR Germani's Emporium, Yourtown, ST *. Spearheaded team-based sales initiative in upscale men's clothing .. store that produced unprecedented quarterly revenue increases Not breathtaking, but certainly better. Are you wondering HOW.to convert your resume into plain text? It's easy. Pongo Resume Members:.Open the resume in your Pongo account, click Download, and choose the Download as Text option. (Your text resume will already be optimized for readability.) From MS Word: Open your resume in Word, then select Save As and choose Plain Text from the Save as Type dropdown. (Then add your keyboard-based formatting.) All in all, a.plain text resume may not be as gorgeous as its professionally designed and nicely formatted counterparts, but it can still do the trick. And when it wins you an interview, be sure to bring.along paper copies of the nice version to hand out! Plain Text Editors Vs Word Processors We all know just how over blated and complicated Microsoft Word is. Well that's the way that most all word processing programs are these days. They all have too many functions going on at one time and too many features that most of us will never use. Word processors are also huge memory hogs taking up much of your valuable RAM. So why do we use them? Well for one thing, it is what we're taught to use. We're taught that word processors are much better to use because of the fact that we need to have a lot of eye candy in our text documents to make them look great. So what is a word processor? Well basically, it is a program that processes words. Now when we say processing, we really do mean processing. Documents can be so processed that they actually lloose their original formatting and purpose. Not only do they have all that formatting included in them, but they also grow in size just as well. A typical word processed document has more information than a plain text version of the same document has. Much of that information has to do with formatting which by the way is native to the program that created the document so more than likely the only program that can view that particular document is the native program, or some other word processing program that also supports the same formatting. This is not good because when you're dealing with highly formatted documents such as word processing files, you run into version conflicts even within the same family of word processors such as the case with Microsoft Word for Windows and Microsoft Word for Mac. So for professionals who use this particular word processing program, unless they convert the document to either plain text, or into RTF format, they will continue to ahve trouble with version conflicts, and that's not good in a professional environment where the accuracy of information is critical. However you will still hear people argue over the whole idea that word processors are better to use than plain text editors. Now while it is true that all of your word processing programs can create plain text files, it is best not to use them due to the fact that it is redundant to use a bloated wordprocessing program to generate plain text files when Windows and Mac both come with plain text editors of their own that are not bloated. That would be like using a steam shouvle to clean out a cat's litter box when you could use something much simpler. However, I believe that you get the idea here. The fact is, using a text editor for plain text just makes perfect sense and believe me, there are plenty of plain text editing programs in which to choose from. I used a program called Metapad to write this book, and it is a plain text editor that is easy to use and is not bloated with too many commands or features. It does exactly what it is supposed to do, and that is; write plain text. It is so small that it can even run from a flash drive without having to be installed. That makes it totally portable and portability is very important these days. Microsoft Word isn't so portable. Now this isn't to say that there are not any portable word processing programs out there, but do you really need a word processor to create plain text files? Absolutely not! A simple plain text editor would do the job nicely because like was mentioned so many times before in this presentation, text files do not have any specialized formatting. They're just plain ASCII text. Okay, what is ASCII? ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. basically in a nutshell, ASCII is the american character set that is used in computers to convey information. You're reading ASCII right now. It is comprised of all letters, numbers, symbols and punctuation that is found in the English language to convey information on a computer system. Each typed character is represented by a special numerical sequence that tells the computer what the letter, number, symbol or punctuation is, and when those numbers are processed by the computer's processing chips, what you see on the screen are the letters, numbers, symbols and punctuation that make up the English language. Believe it or not, ASCII is used world wide because most computers are in English. English is quickly becoming the world wide standard in business communications and therefore, most all computers use the ASCII encoding to convey that information to the end users. ASCII text is also known as MS-DOS text because DOS was the first operating system that people used before Windows came onto the scene. DOS was a non-graphical user interface which relied heavily on ASCII encoding with the exception of DOS based word processing programs such as WordStar and a few others that started implementing their own version of markup in their documents to make those documents native to the programs that created them. However, plain text was still the norm at that particular time in computer history. Of course, word processors kept on getting bigger and bigger and required more memory just to run, and along with that came more graphically appealing machines that allowed for fancier graphical designs and fancier fonts to be used in documents. Word processors do a lot of things with the text. They correct it, re-align it, reformat it, and so much more. Word processors have so many features these days that mos people don't even use them accept for a very rare occasion when that particular item is needed which could be once in a blue moon. This is why word processing programs are so bloated. Their creators want them to be the be all and end all of writing programs. So they bloat them with tons and tons of features which makes them even more costly to purchase. However, on the other hand, plain text editors are just that, editors. They do not do any processing of the text. They just let you write the text and save it. Now if the editor can handle coding such as HTML and such, then there may be menus and stuff that the end user can use to implement those items into their working document. However, they're still dealing with plain ordinary text files. Blind People Don't Need Formatting Imagine for a moment not having any sight. Now imagine trying to understand the layout of a word processing document and now try to understand font styles and sizes. Can you see just how difficult this would be to a totally blind individual? Also try to describe color to a blind person and see how they would react. If the individual had never seen anything thorughout their entire life, then there's no way that you could describe accurately font styles, sizes or colors. To a blind person, the text on the page is just that, plain ordinary text. Sure the screen readers that blind people use give this information to the user, but for most blind people, font styles, layouts, colors and sizes are not relevant. Now with a few exceptions such as left alignment, centered and right alignment, any blind person could understand that, but try to describe the color red to someone who has never seen before and you have a huge problem. How do you describe not only the color red, but also the font style that they're using and so on. All of those items are directly sight related. Now screen readers my help the blind individual defrenciate between a capital letter and lower case letters o the page by making the capital pronounce in a slightly higher pitch, or telling the user that their text is centered, left aligned, right aligned or justified. These are a few of the formatting elements that blind people can understand, but colors are not so easily transcribed. So to the blind user, all of the text looks the same to them because the screen reader is reading it to them. So for a blind person, all of that fancy formatting really doesn't mean anything at all. Now of course, blind people do use programs like Microsoft Word because that's what they're taught that they should use whether they're writing their own documents, or writing documents for work or school. A matter of fact, Microsoft Word is what most people use when they're writing, and that's the program that they go to first because that's the standard for writing these days. Note Taking On The Go These days, it is important to have a way that you can take notes while on the go. Some people use notepad aps on their smart phones, and some people use electronic pens to handwrite their notes. and then there are those who use netbooks and laptops to take their notes and store them digitally so that they can be edited on the computer. Whatever method that you choose, you want to make sure that the note taking method can create plain text files because as was stated above, plain text files are the most common denominator there is when it comes to desciminating information. Notetaking devices don't have to be complicated or cumbersome tools in which to use. They need to be simple and easy to use. They need to be ready on the spot and they need to boot up quickly so that you can begin the notetaking process as soon as possible without wasting a lot of time booting up the device and so on. The main focus of the notetaking device is its ability to create plain text, not word processed documents. The reason why you want to use plain text while on the go is so that you can sync everything so that the information can actually follow you wherever you may go. So for example, you could work on a plain text document at home, save it to dropbox, and then go to the office, open up your dropbox folder and then re-open that very same file and continue working on it and so on without you having to transport SD cards, or flash drives from place to place. At this point, everything is done from within the cloud which makes things a whole lot easier these days. However, if you're one of those who has a standard PC at home, but work on a Mac on the job, then you might have a real problem if you saved your word processed document to the cloud from your home computer and then tried to re-open it on your Mac machine at work. So why would you have this problem? Well it all has to do with version conflicts and the mere fact that Microsoft Word for the PC is not the same as Microsoft Word for the Mac. Although both versions of the program come from the same company, they're still quite different from each other because both computer platforms are different from each other. However, if you had done everything in plain text you wouldn't have this problem at all because a Mac can open up a text file created on a PC. That's because the document in question is just a plain ASCII text document free of any complex coding or formatting that may be needed by certain native programs. Now you may be asking, am I trying to stear you away from word processors? The answer is of course yes. You see, word processors really have no purpose other than to beautify print for printing. Read the following excerpt here below to see why I am trying to steer you away from word processors and am trying to direct you to plain text editors. http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient 1. The claim 2. Printed documents ....2.1. Composition versus typesetting ....2.2. The evils of WYSIWYG ....2.3. Document structure ....2.4. Text editors ....2.5. The virtues of ASCII ....2.6. The typesetter ....2.7. Putting it together 3. Digital dissemination ....3.1. Simple documents ....3.2. Complex documents 4. Qualification 5. Rant, rant 6. References 1..The claim The word processor is a stupid and grossly inefficient tool for preparing text for communication with others. That is the claim I shall defend below. It will probably strike you as bizarre at first sight. If I am against word processors, what do I propose: that we write in longhand, or use a mechanical typewriter? No. While there are things to be said in favor of these modes of text preparation I take it for granted that most readers of this essay will do most of their writing using a computer, as I do. My claim is that there are much better ways of preparing text, using a computer, than the word processor. The wording of my claim is intended to be provocative, but let me be clear: when I say word processors are stupid I am not saying that you, if you are a user of a word processor, are stupid. I am castigating a technology, but one that is assiduously promoted by the major software vendors, and that has become a de facto standard of sorts. Unless you happen to have been in the right place at the right time, you are likely unaware of the existence of alternatives. The alternatives are not promoted by the major vendors, for good reason: as we shall see, they are available for free. Let's begin by working back from the end product. Text that is designed to communicate ideas and information to others is disseminated in two main ways: 1. As "hard copy", that is, in the form of traditional printed documents. 2. By digital means: electronic mail, web pages, documents designed to be viewable on screen. There is some overlap here. For instance, a document that is intended for printing may be distributed in digital form, in the hope that the recipient has the means to print the file in question. But let us consider these two modes of dissemination in turn. 2..Printed documents You want to type a document at your computer keyboard, and have it appear in nicely printed form at your computer's printer. Naturally you don't want this to happen in real time (the material appearing at the printer as you type). You want to type the document first and "save" it in digital form on some storage medium. You want to be able to retrieve the document and edit it at will, and to send it to the printer when the time is right. Surely a word processor-such as the market leader, Microsoft Word-is the "natural" way to do all this? Well, it's one way, but not the best. Why not? 2.1..Composition versus typesetting Preparing printable text using a word processor effectively forces you to conflate two tasks that are conceptually distinct and that, to ensure that people's time is used most effectively and that the final communication is most effective, ought also to be kept practically distinct. The two tasks are 1. The composition of the text itself. By this I mean the actual choice of words to express one's ideas, and the logical structuring of the text. The latter may take various forms depending on the nature of the document. It includes matters such as the division of the text into paragraphs, sections or chapters, the choice of whether certain material will appear as footnotes or in the main text, the adding of special emphasis to certain portions of the text, the representation of some pieces of text as block quotations rather than as the author's own words, and so on. 2. The typesetting of the document. This refers to matters such as the choice of the font family in which the text is to be printed, and the way in which structural elements will be visually represented. Should section headings be in bold face or small capitals? Should they be flush left or centered? Should the text be justified or not? Should the notes appear at the foot of the page or at the end? Should the text be set in one column or two? And so on. The author of a text should, at least in the first instance, concentrate entirely on the first of these sets of tasks. That is the author's business. Adam Smith famously pointed out the great benefits that flow from the division of labor. Composition and logical structuring of text is the author's specific contribution to the production of a printed text. Typesetting is the typesetter's business. This division of labour was of course fulfilled in the traditional production of books and articles in the pre-computer age. The author wrote, and indicated to the publisher the logical structure of the text by means of various annotations. The typesetter translated the author's text into a printed document, implementing the author's logical design in a concrete typographical design. One only has to imagine, say, Jane Austen wondering in what font to put the chapter headings of Pride and Prejudice to see how ridiculous the notion is. Jane Austen was a great writer; she was not a typesetter. You may be thinking this is beside the point. Jane Austen's writing was publishable; professional typesetters were interested in laying it out and printing it. You and I are not so lucky; if we want a printed article we will have to do it ourselves (and besides, we want it done much faster than via traditional typesetting). Well, yes and no. We will in a sense have to do it ourselves (on our own computers), but we have a lot of help at our disposal. In particular we have a professional-quality typesetting program available. This program (or set of programs) will in effect do for us, for free and in a few seconds or fractions of a second, the job that traditional typesetters did for Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott and all the rest. We just have to supply the program with a suitably marked-up text, as the traditional author did. I am suggesting, therefore, that should be two distinct "moments" in the production of a printed text using a computer. First one types one's text and gets its logical structure right, indicating this structure in the text via simple annotations. This is accomplished using a text editor, a piece of software not to be confused with a word processor. (I will explain this distinction more fully below.) Then one "hands over" one's text to a typesetting program, which in a very short time returns beautifully typeset copy. 2.2..The evils of WYSIWYG These two jobs are rolled into one with the modern WYSIWYG ("What You See Is What You Get") word processor. You type your text, and as you go the text is given, on the computer screen, a concrete typographical representation which supposedly corresponds closely to what you will see when you send the document to the printer (although for various reasons it does not always do so). In effect, the text is continuously typeset as you key it in. At first sight this may seem to be a great convenience; on closer inspection it is a curse. There are three aspects to this. 1. The author is distracted from the proper business of composing text, in favor of making typographical choices in relation to which she may have no expertise ("fiddling with fonts and margins" when she should be concentrating on content). 2. The typesetting algorithm employed by WYSIWYG word processor sacrifices quality to the speed required for the setting and resetting of the user's input in real time. The final product is greatly inferior to that of a real typesetting program. 3. The user of a word processor is under a strong temptation to lose sight of the logical structure of the text and to conflate this with superficial typographical elements. The first two points above should be self-explanatory. Let me expand on the third. (Its importance depends on the sort of document under consideration.) 2.3..Document structure Take for instance a section heading. So far as the logical structure of a document is concerned, all that matters is that a particular piece of text should be "marked" somehow as a section heading. One might for instance type \section{Text of heading}. How section headings will be implemented typographically in the printed version is a separate question. When you're using a word processor, though, what you see is (all!) you get. You are forced to decide on a specific typographical appearance for your heading as you create it. Suppose you decide you'd like your headings in boldface, and slightly larger than the rest of the text. How are you going to achieve this appearance? There's more than one way to do it, but for most people the most obvious and intuitive way (given the whole WYSIWYG context) is to type the text of the heading, highlight it, click the boldface icon, pull down the little box of point sizes for the type, and select a larger size. The heading is now bold and large. Great! But what says it's a heading? There's nothing in your document that logically identifies this little bit of text as a section heading. Suppose at some later date you decide that you'd actually prefer to have the headings in small caps, or numbered with roman numerals, or centered, or whatever. What you'd like to say is "Please make such-and-such a change in the setting of all section headings." But if you've applied formatting as described above, you'll have to go through your entire document and alter each heading manually. Now there is a way of specifying the structural status of bits of text in (for instance) Microsoft Word. You can, if you are careful, achieve effects such as changing the appearance of all section headings with one command. But few users of Word exploit this consistently, and that is not surprising: the WYSIWYG approach does not encourage concern with structure. You can easily-all too easily-"fake" structure with low-level formatting commands. When typing one's text using a text editor, on the other hand, the need to indicate structure is immediately apparent. 2.4..Text editors OK, it's probably time to explain what a text editor is, and how it differs from a word processor. A modern text editor looks a bit like a word processor. It has the usual apparatus of pull-down menus and/or clickable icons for functions like opening and saving files, searching and replacing, checking spelling, and so on. But it has no typesetting functionality. The text you type appears on screen in a clear visual representation, but with no pretense at representing the final printed appearance of the document. When you save your document, it is saved in the form of plain text, which in the US context usually means in "ASCII" (the American Standard Code for Information Interchange). ASCII is composed of 128 characters (this is sometimes referred to as a "7-bit" character set, since it requires 7 binary digits for its encoding: 2 to the seventh power = 128). It includes the numerals 0 through 9, the roman alphabet in both upper and lower case, the standard punctuation marks, and a number of special characters. ASCII is the lowest common denominator of textual communication in digital form. An ASCII message will be "understandable" by any computer in the world. If you send such a message, you can be sure that the recipient will see precisely what you typed. By contrast, when you save a file from a word processor, the file contains various "control" characters, outside of the ASCII range. These characters represent the formatting that you applied (e.g.. boldface or italics) plus various sorts of internal "business" relating to the mechanics of the word processor. They are not universally "understandable". To make sense of them, you need a copy of the word processor with which the document was created (or some suitable conversion filter). If you open a word processor file in a text editor, you will see (besides the text, or bits of it) a lot of "funny looking stuff": this is the binary formatting code. Since a text editor does not insert any binary formatting codes, if you want to represent features such as italics you have to do this via mark-up. That is, you type in an annotation (using nothing but ASCII), which will tell the typesetter to put the specified text into italics. For example, for the LaTeX typesetter (more on this below) you would type \textit{stuff you want in italics}. Actually, if you are using a text editor which is designed to cooperate with LaTeX you would not have to type this yourself. You'd type some kind of shortcut sequence, select from a menu, or click an icon, and the appropriate annotation would be inserted for you; the mechanics of typing an ASCII document suitable for feeding to LaTeX are not much different from typing in a modern word processor. 2.5..The virtues of ASCII The approach of composing your text in plain ASCII using a text editor, then typesetting it with a separate program, has several "incidental" virtues. 1. Portability: as mentioned above, anybody, using any computer platform, will be able to read your marked-up text, even if they don't have the means to view or print the typeset version. By contrast your Snazz 9.0 word processor file can be completely incomprehensible to a recipient who doesn't have the same brand and version of word processor as you-unless he or she is quite knowledgeable about computers and is able to extract the actual text from the binary "garbage". And this applies to you over time, as much as to you and a correspondent at one time. You may well have difficulty reading Snazz 8.0 files using Snazz 9.0, or vice versa, but you'll never have any trouble reading old ASCII files. 2. Compactness: an ASCII file represents your ideas, and not a lot of word processor "business". For small documents in particular, word processor files can be as much as 10 times as large as a corresponding ASCII file containing the same relevant information. 3. Security: the "text editor to typesetter" approach virtually guarantees that you will never have any problem of corruption of your documents (unless you suffer a hard disk crash or some comparable calamity). The source text will always be there, even if the typesetter fails for some reason. If you regularly use a word processor and have not had a problem with file corruption then you're very lucky! 2.6..The typesetter By this time I owe you a bit more detail on the typesetter part of the strategy I'm advocating. I won't go into technical details here, but will try to say enough to give you some idea of what I'm talking about. The basic typesetting program that I have in mind is called TeX, and was written by Donald Knuth of Stanford University. TeX is available for free (via downloading from many Internet sites), in formats suitable for just about every computer platform. (You can if you wish purchase a CDROM with a complete set of TeX files for a very modest price.) Knuth started work on TeX in 1977; in 1990 he announced that he no longer intended to develop the program-not because of lack of interest, but rather because by this time the program was essentially perfected. It is as bug-free as any computer program can be, and it does a superb job of typesetting just about any material, from simple text to the higher mathematics. I referred above to LaTeX. If TeX is the basic typesetting engine, LaTeX is a large set of macros, initially developed by Leslie Lamport in the 1980s and now maintained by an international group of experts. These macros make life a lot easier for the average user of the system. LaTeX is still under active development, as new capabilities and packages are built on top of the underlying typesetter. Various "add-ons" for TeX are also under development, such as a system which allows you to make PDF (Adobe's "Portable Document Format") files directly from your ASCII source files. (I say "under development" but by this I just mean that they are continuously being improved. The programs are already very stable and full-featured.) As mentioned above, you indicate the desired structure and formatting of your document to LaTeX in the form of a set of annotations. There are many books (and web-based guides) that give the details of these annotations, and I will not go into them here. The common annotations are simple and easily remembered, besides which LaTeX-friendly text editors (of which there are many) offer you a helping hand. One very attractive feature of LaTeX is the ability to change the typeset appearance of your text drastically and consistently with just a few commands. The overall appearance is controlled by 1. The "document class" that you choose (e.g. report, letter, article, book). 2. The "packages" or style files that you decide to load. You can, for instance, completely change the font family (consistently across text, section headings, footnotes and all) and/or the sizes of the fonts used, by altering just one or two parameters in the "preamble" of your ASCII source file. Similarly, you can put everything into two-column format, or rotate it from portrait to landscape. It may be possible to accomplish something similar using a word processor, but generally it's much less convenient and you are far more likely to mess up and introduce unintended inconsistencies of formatting. You can get as complex as you care to, typesetting with LaTeX. You can choose a "hands off" approach: just specify a document class and leave the rest up to the default macros. Generally this produces good results, the typesetting being of much higher quality than any word processor. (Naturally, things like numbering of chapters, sections and footnotes, cross-references and so on, are all taken care of automatically.) Or you can take a more "interventionist" approach, loading various packages (or even writing your own) to control various aspects of the typography. If this is your inclination, you can produce truly beautiful and individual output. 2.7..Putting it together Let me give you just a brief idea of how this all works. If you have a good TeX setup it's like this: You type your text into a TeX-aware editor. You can type the required annotations directly or have the editor insert them via menus or buttons. When you reach a point where you'd like to take a look at the typeset version you make a menu choice or click a button in the editor to invoke the typesetter. Another menu item or button will open a previewer in which you see the text as it will appear at the printer. And generally this is true "WYSIWYG"-the previewer will show a highly accurate representation of the printed output. You can zoom in or out, page around, and so on. You send the output to the printer with another menu choice or button, or go back to editing. At some later point in the process you want to preview the updated file. Click the typesetter button again. This time you don't have to invoke the previewer again: if you've left it running in the background it will now automatically display the updated typeset version. When you're done with an editing session you can delete the typeset version of the file to conserve disk space. You just need to save the ASCII source file; the typeset version can easily be recreated whenever you need it. 3..Digital dissemination The previous section was mostly angled towards producing good-looking typeset output at the printer. Some other considerations arise when you're preparing a document with digital transmission in mind (email, web pages and so on). Take email first. Typically if people wish to send a short, ad hoc, message they type that message directly into an email client program, whether it be a "traditional" text-based client such as Pine or a GUI (Graphical User Interface) program such as Netscape or Eudora. In that case the message probably goes out in the form of ASCII (or perhaps in HTML, i.e..HyperText Mark-up Language, the language of Web pages, which is itself mostly composed of ASCII). But what if you want to send a longer piece of text that you have already prepared independently of your email client program? For this purpose it is increasingly common to "attach" a document in a word processor format. How does the alternative strategy work in this case? Well, we have to distinguish between two situations: Is the text in question relatively short and uncomplicated (a memo, a letter, minutes of a meeting, a listing of agenda, a schedule for a visit) or is it more complex (an academic paper-perhaps with a lot of mathematics, a report with illustrations, a book manuscript)? The "ASCII plus typesetter" approach leads to different suggestions in these two cases. 3.1..Simple documents With simple documents, we have to ask: Do we really need the typesetting, the font information and all that? Is it not more efficient, more in the interest of effective and economical communication, just to post plain ASCII text, with the minimal formatting that ASCII allows? This both conserves communications bandwidth (remember that word processor files can be much bigger than ASCII files containing the same actual text) and ensures that nobody will be frozen out of the communication effort because they happen not to be running Snazz 9.0. You can attach an ASCII file, created in a text editor, in the same way that you'd attach a word processor file, or you can simply paste it into the body of your email (since it's nothing but plain text). Since TeX source files are nothing but ASCII-and if we're talking about a simple document there won't be too many annotations, and those pretty self-explanatory-they can be treated in the same way. 3.2..Complex documents Longer and more complicated documents may well be easier to read in typeset form. Math may be hard to convey in ASCII and of course complex diagrams and images are out altogether. So what about TeX, in this context? I have argued that word processor files can be problematic, because your correspondent might not have Snazz 9.0 like you do. But doesn't this cut both ways? Even if you're fired up enough about TeX to give it a try, how many of your correspondents have a TeX installation? This is a reasonable query, but it is answerable. If you want your correspondent to be able to see a typeset version of your file, and she doesn't have a TeX installation, you have these options: 1. Convert the TeX source file to HTML. There are good conversion programs for this purpose. (HTML and TeX actually have a strong family resemblance, in that they both involve logical mark-up, so inter-conversion can be accomplished with a high degree of fidelity.1) Then your correspondent can read your text using a web browser. 2. Does your correspondent have access to a Postscript printer? In an academic or business environment this is quite likely. In that case you could send a fully typeset version of your document in the form of a postscript file, which she can just send to the printer. And/or she can view it on screen if she installs the "ghostview" program (free for downloading from the Internet). 3. Does your correspondent have the "Acroread" reader for Adobe PDF files installed? (Again, it's a free download.) If so, you can send a PDF version of your typeset document. In discussing the options for transmitting text via email, we've already hit on the issue of preparing text for web pages. You have the option of writing HTML directly. If you don't want to do that, you can write HTML indirectly using a suitable GUI editor, Netscape Communicator for example. Sure, you can also produce HTML using MS Word (incidentally, horrible HTML, full of extraneous tags that make it awkward to edit using any other application). If you're in TeX mode it's easy to convert your documents into (clean, standard-compliant) HTML. 4..Qualification I have attempted to make a strong pitch for the "ascii plus typesetter" alternative to word processors. I will admit, however, that there are some sorts of documents for which a WYSIWYG word processor is indeed the natural tool. I'm thinking of short, ad hoc, documents which have a high ratio of formatting "business" to textual content: flyers, posters, party invitations and the like. You could do these in TeX, but it would not be efficient. The standard LaTeX document classes (report, article, etc.) would be of little use to you. And while LaTeX is very smart at handling automatically the range of fonts that you're likely to want in a formal text, it's not geared toward the sort of "mixing and matching" of jolly fonts that you might want in a casual production. Logical structure is not really an issue: you're interested in "raw formatting". You want to know, for instance, If I put that line into a 36-point font, will that push my last line onto the next page, which I don't want? WYSIWYG is your man. If most of your word-processing work is of this kind, you probably stopped reading a long time ago. If most of your text preparation work involves the production of relatively formal documents, this qualification doesn't affect the essentials of my case. 5..Rant, rant It may not have escaped your notice that I'm a bit worked up about this theme. Yes, I am. The point is that it's not just a matter of an academic debate between alternative modes of text preparation. It's a set of scales in which the might and wealth of the major software vendors is all on one side. To be blunt, we're looking at a situation in which MS Word is poised to become, for much of the world, the standard for the preparation of documents using computers. But Word is a standard that has little to commend it other than the fact that it is (or aspires to be) a standard. It's a bit like QWERTY. Do you know that story? Why the standard arrangement of keys on typewriter keyboards (and by extension computer keyboards) has QWERTYUIOP along the top line? That was not the original arrangement of typewriter keys. It was designed for a purpose, namely to slow typists down. The problem was that the expertise of the early typists quickly outran the capabilities of the early mechanical typewriters: a fast typist could jam the keys, hitting them faster than they could return after striking the ribbon. QWERTY distributed the keys so they couldn't go so fast. This is clearly a crazy arrangement for the keys on an electronic keyboard, but it's too late to change: QWERTY is standard, and all attempts to rationalize the keyboard have failed in the face of that reality. Similarly, I'm arguing that MS Word has no right to be a standard for document preparation, since it's clearly less efficient (for most purposes) than readily available alternatives. I'm hoping that it's not too late in this case, that there's still the opportunity of saying No to Word. Actually, in a sense Word is worse than QWERTY: it's not a real standard, but rather an escalator. The Microsoft "standard" for the binary representation of document formatting is something that is variable at the whim of Microsoft Corporation. The MS Word quasi-monopoly piggybacks off the Microsoft Windows quasi-monopoly (an issue which I will not get into here). And so long as they are not hard-pressed by commercial rivals, Microsoft has no particular interest in establishing any sort of long-term standard for the binary representation of formatting. On the contrary, they have a strong interest in forcing you to "upgrade" Word at regular intervals. Oh dear, Word N.0 won't read the document your colleague just sent you, prepared using N+1? Well, you'd better update then, hadn't you? Even if there are no features in N+1, that were not present in N, that are of any real value to you.2 6..References If you've come with me this far, you might be interested in more details about good text editors, the TeX typesetting system and so on. The best place to start for info about TeX and friends is probably the TUG homepage (TUG is the TeX Users Group). This will provide all the links you might need; one of the main ones is to the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network (CTAN) sites, from which you can download complete TeX systems for just about all computer platforms. Such systems include the actual typesetter, a large collection of macros, a previewer, and software for generating printable files. TeX packages (free ones at any rate) do not generally include the text editor that you'll also need (unless you already have one that you like). There are many choices, but my personal favorite for working with TeX files is Emacs, along with the AUC TeX package. The latter makes Emacs very TeX-friendly: it will highlight TeX syntax so you can see any errors in your mark-up at a glance, and it also offers a wide range of TeX-related commands on convenient menus. Footnotes: 1 The binary coding used by word processors is a quite different animal, so inter-conversion between TeX and word processor formats is not easy. In addition, since TeX is a superior typesetting engine, it is in principle impossible to convert a TeX document to, say, Word without loss of information. 2 For what it is worth, in my opinion as somebody who used Word for several years before switching to TeX, and who has a keen interest in typesetting, no worthwhile features have been introduced into MS Word for Windows since version 2.0 of circa 1990. Now as you can see from the article above, word processors are really not the right tools to use when creating documents for printing and so on. They're also not good for pretty much anything accept for making Microsoft a whole lot of money if you use Microsoft Word. The fact is, word processors no matter how fancy they are just don't cut it when it comes to creating common documents. Sure they can save files in plain ASCII format, but do you really need a fancy word processor to do that? No not really. Any simple plain text editor can do the job quite nicely, and with very little effort. That's because plain text editors are just for creating plain text, and not word processed documents.. Destraction Free Writing Environments Now while we still have Microsoft Word on the brain, have a look at how cumbersom and busy that program really is. Believe it or not, there's a whole lot of stuff staring you right in the face begging you to push that, press this and on and on. All those buttons, graphical elements, pop up messages and so on are all just busyness. They make Microsoft Word too busy because the program is doing too many things at one time. Therefore, programs like Microsoft Word are really memory hogs. Yes, they really take up a whole lot of your computer's resources just to be able to run and function, and all of that just to write text or print text? Is that really necessary? That's just as good as dawning a space suit just to go outside and protect you from the sun. In otherwords, the space suit is too much just as Microsoft Word is too much just to write text documents and print them. In other words; it's overkill. So while Microsoft is releasing Word 2099, all of the other word documents that you had written by that same program from years earlier have become totally useless to you and you will not be able to even read them in that version of Microsoft Word. However, if those same files were saved in plain ASCII text format, even the very latest version of Microsoft Word should be able to read plain text files. That's because plain text like was mentioned earlier in this book is the common denominator. It is also believe it or not, the defacto standard for information sharing and expression. And as was stated earlier in this book, we all use plain text when we text each other. We don't worry about formatting the text we just write and send it. That's it. That is why it is called texting. Academic texts Reports and Other Formalities Earlier here in this book we discussed resumes and how you can actually create a resume using nothing more than plain text. Well believe it or not, using plain text for academic use has its advantages just as well. As was stated so many times, plain text is much easier. However, did I also tell you that it is also much faster? Well it's true. writing plain text without any type of formatting is much faster than worrying about the specialized formatting that so many works go into these days. There is always a formality for just about everything these days, and when it comes to reports and such, you bet there's some sort of specialized format that they're supposed to be in. However, educators are always worried about the fancy formatting, fonts and who knows what else goes into a particular document structure rather than the information itself. It seams that no matter where you turn these days, someone is going nuts over the fact that a particular type of document isn't in a particular format and so on. A matter of fact, some educators will give you a failing grade if the document isn't in that particular format. You could have all the facts, figures and all the right information, have perfect spelling and punctuation, but if the document isn't using a particular font, or isn't positioned on the page somehow, it becomes a failed work. So then all that time you spent on putting it together, doing all that research, gathering all those facts and figures had just gone to waste over the fact that the document was in plain text rather than in some fancy format. What just happened is that the information in the work becomes less important and the formatting becomes the most important. Kind of like people going gaga over how someone looks and so on. More attention is paid to the look rather than the performance or the information therein. So therefore, the information is then wasted over the look. Here again, what most people seam to forget is that all that fancy formatting and structuring only draws attention from the work, plus it also places that particular work into a category that will degrade over time whereas if they had just put that same information into plain text, it would last virtually forever. Of course, what you could do is to satisfy your teachers and professors, you could put the work into their desired format and structure and save it in that particular format and then save yourself a copy of that same work in plain text. That's one way to handle this delima. So while you're satisfying your educator's taste in fancy ness, you're also saving the work in a format that will withstand the true test of time. Then in the future, if you met up with your teachers and professors, you could tell them to open up Word 2099 and load the DOC file that you had created for them all those years ago and watch them struggle and wonder why in the world that DOC file will not open, while you open Word 2099 and load a plain text file into it which is that same work that you did all those years agao and it opens up flawlessly as it had just been written that very hour; amazing! So all that fancy formatting had gone down the drain, but you still possessed that plain text version of that paper that you did and it still can be read even in the year 2099., and it was opened using Microsoft Word 2099 also. Now that's truly amazing! You see, that's the problem with formatting text. Once you format it and save it in that particular format; what's to guarantee that it will be readable in the future? There are absolutely no gurantees that you will even be able to open up that file again unless you had saved it as a plain text file. Only plain text files will withstand the true test of time while those specialized formatted files will just die off and never be read again. So maybe after all of us humans are gone and all those word documents have finally bit the dust, somewhere there are some text files that some future race will be able to open up and read all about us and how we lived. Project Gutenberg What is Project Gutenberg? It is a means by which classic litterature and some other texts are preserved in electronic format for future generations to read. Project Gutenberg is a strong supporter of plain ASCII textual information. Anyone who has an e-reader, or who is blind or visually impaired can go to the site and download free material and begin reading. Now while the files on that site aren't graphically appealing, what you ahve to remember is that its whole purpose is to preserve textual information, not focus on fancy images and graphics. Their main focus is the information itself, not so much on the formatting of that information. Of course, plain text files are also known as Etexts as well. So as you can see here, there are many others who feel the same way that I do when it comes to plain text files. Now while you can use a word processor to generate plain text files, the only real reason why I would see somebody doing that has to do with the fact that more than likely the word processor has a grammar check and spell check facility included in the program. However, if you search hard enough, there are plain text editors that come with grammar check and spell check facilities, and there are some editors that can even check programming code such as HTML too. As a rule, most text editing tools can be installed onto a flash drive or SD card for portability purposes. that's what makes text editors so great. The mere fact that you can store a text editor onto a flash drive and take it with you is a huge plus in my book. The reason being is that I may not want to use somebody else's word processing program or text editing program if I have to use their machine. I want to use my own software that I bring with me. And, there's nothing in the world wrong with that. 5 Unexpected Benefits of Plain Text Files for Writers http://becomeawritertoday.com/plain-text/ Here's yet another strong case for using plain text files from the site listed above. Plain text or .txt files are a simple and effective format that belong in every writerís workflow. Here are five unexpected reasons why they rock: 1. You Donít Have to Worry if People Can Open Them You donít need special software or tools to open a plain text file. This is a real problem for certain formats, as those who have tried to open a .docx file on older versions of Word understand. Itís not always possible for various word processing applications to open certain file types. If theyíre plain text, youíre guaranteed that anyone can open them on any system. Plain text files have been around longer than many operating systems and theyíre not going anywhere. 2. Plain Text Files are Light and Fast Older computers can struggle with the latest word processors. Tables, pictures and macros can bog down large documents, as can pages of text. Text files on the other hand lack all these kind of fancy features and, for this reason, they open quickly and easily. Theyíre also smaller in size than proprietary word processing files, which makes them easier to email and share with others. And itís easier for operating systems to index plain text files, which means they appear quicker in system-wide searches. 3. Itís Quicker to Write Something Short in a Plain Text Editor Word, Pages and the various other word processors feature a wealth of templates, options, tools and menus designed for complex jobs. Sometimes all a writer needs is somewhere to type, a spell checker and some basic formatting options. Sometimes all a writer needs is somewhere to type, a spell checker and some basic formatting options. All of those menus, ribbons and inspectors can be distracting. And they slow writing down. TextEdit, Notepad and Vim deserve some love. And there are plenty of other plain text editors that are just as good looking as their proprietary big brothers. 4. Plain Text Files are Flexible You can easily copy and paste the contents of a plain text file into any document or application. Itís not possible to say the same about specialist applications that use proprietary databases or formats. In other words, if itís in plain text to begin with, itís easy to migrate to a more complex application. If itís in a complex application to begin with, itís a lot more time-consuming to go back to plain text. 5. Plain Text Always Looks the Same You can spend hours formatting a document in a word processor, only for someone else to open it and find that it looks slightly different on their machine. Plain text files, on the other hand, look the same on any system. Granted plain text editors lack complex formatting options but these are often features that arenít needed until the document is near completion. When youíre at this stage, you should consider exporting the document to a PDF. And, if that's not enough, here are 10 text files you must have on your desktop They're explained here below. 10 Plain Text Files You Should Have on Your Desktop for Higher Productivity https://zapier.com/blog/plain-text-files-for-productivity/ A "Write Every day" File Write Every day I came across a comment somewhere in my wanderings around the internet that suggested this clever use of plain text files. The commenter had a single text file saved to their desktop in which they wrote something every day. The idea was to cultivate a daily writing habit, which many people doóoften using separate text files per day, a journalling app, or a purpose-made app like 750 Words. Using a single text file instead means all of your writing is together in one place, and it's not stored onlineóit's private and local. Plus, it's easy to get started with: just open up the file each morning, type out the date and get writing. Later you can go back over your file to see what you wrote and how much you wrote per day. A Plain Text To-Do List todo.txt Todo.txt's syntax rules include setting priorities (A, B, C), contexts (@phone, @car, @store), and projects (+Work, +GarageSale). Of course, you could create a plain text to do list any way you like, but if you want some extra bells and whistles, try Todo.txt by Gina Trapani, founder of Lifehacker and co-founder of ThinkUp. You can use Todo.txt's syntax in the Android and iOS apps, from the command line, or in any text editor. For some text editors, you can get plugins to add things like syntax highlighting. A "Done" List done list There's something to be said for seeing how much you've gotten done at the end of the day. You know how satisfying it is to cross out items on your to do list, and then look back at the list to see everything you completed? A "done" list, or "anti-todo list" as Marc Andreessen calls it, works in a similar fashion: you simply take note of each thing you get done during the day. Start out with the date and just list your "done" items underneath. Not only will this help you review your productivity at the end of each day and make you feel better about what you got done, but it can be really useful to keep around as a work log. You might want to look back in weeks or months to come to see what you were working on or how long a project took to complete. Action Plan action plan Computer scientist Cal Newport uses a text file to plan his week (example above) so he can get more done. Even if you use a complicated task management app, you might still benefit from doing a simple weekly plan like this. I do both, as I need a robust system to keep track of everything, but a simple to do list for the week keeps me from getting overwhelmed. Cal doesn't have any rules for his plan: Once a week, usually on Mondays, I open a small text file named plan.txt and jot down my action plan for the week. There are no hard rules for this plan. Some weeks it's a few sentences. Usually, it's a few paragraphs. Sometimes it spans multiple pages. The great thing about using a text file for your weekly plan is that you have the flexibility to experiment. You don't need to fit in with any particular feature setójust try out different ways of planning your week and stick with what works. Journal There are some great apps for journalling now, but if you don't want to pay for yet another app just to hold your journal, a text file can work just as well. You won't get the extras of an app made for journalling, such as automatic weather data, tags, or adding images, but if your aim is to build the simple habit of penning some thoughts every day, plain text will more than suit your needs. A related idea is writing letters for your children to read when they grow up. I came across this idea on Hacker News, where a parent mentioned writing emails to their son every day. If you'd rather store all that data yourself and not have it filling up an email account, you could use a text file to keep a running list of short letters to your children about their progress. Idea file idea file I recently wrote about how to come up with better ideas. If you're thinking up new ideas all the time, you're going to want somewhere to put them. A simple text file can be a flexible way of storing your ideasóyou can add a date if you want to, and you can come back to the list and add notes later to expand on it. Self-Tracking File With all the technology available now to help us track pretty much every aspect of our lives, you might wonder why anyone would opt for a text file instead. The answer is the same as it would be for any of the other ideas listed hereótext files are flexible, simple, and future-proof. If you note down your exercise, measurements, habit progress, or other metrics in a text file, you won't need to worry about whether your favorite service will keep your data safe, or how they want to structure it. Of course, you also give up the option of connecting your data to other services via integrations and APIs, but if that's not important for you, plain text will work. Want Another Reason To Hate Word Processors? Here's yet another rant on word processors that I have found online that I think you might like to read. All Word Processors Suck http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=11809 Maybe youíve heard about it already, but Iíve been working on a book. I began working in Google Docs. I use Docs for my weekly column. It has what I need from a word processor: It loads quickly, gives word count & page number, has spell-checking, and doesnít try to do my thinking for me. I plodded away on the book for about three months using Docs, before I discovered that it has a size limit. At 90k words, Google Docs told me my document was too large. Fair enough. Itís called ìGoogle Docsî not ìGoogle Great Big Honkiní Booksî. I could have split it into two documents, but I knew that sooner or later I was going to have to move to a standard word processor. I have proof readers lined up. Professionals, who know their way around a rough draft of a book. And the thing Iíve learned is that the business more or less orbits around Microsoft Word. Sure, you can submit in other formats, but the most convenient way to share is to simply use what everyone else is using. You know how it goes. Of course, buying Microsoft Word myself is out of the question. Aside from the expense, it really is horrible software. I had a copy of it about five or six years ago and I gave it away, vowing Iíd never use it again. Itís a stupid, buggy, pushy, ugly, bloated, nagging, resource pig. Itís like one of those novelty swiss army knives with too many features. Attached to a brick. With a serrated handle. Yeah, maybe I MIGHT need a spoon someday. But maybe I wonít want to eat with a spoon that folds in next to the knife I used to gut fish. And this saw blade might come in useful, provided I donít need a blade longer than 2 inches and it doesnít fold up on my fingers while Iím cutting. Oops, I folded the scissors away improperly and now the screwdriver is bent. And the whole thing is too large to fit in my pocket, which sort of defeats the purpose of joining the tools together in the first place. Eventually I decided to jump to Libre Office, which is a fork of the open-source project Open Office, which was created as a alternative to Microsoft Word. Unfortunately, it also adopted Wordís kitchen-sink approach to features, which means it propagated a great many of the sins of Microsoft. Oh, itís not as clunky and slow, and it doesnít spam my desktop with useless launchers and notification windows. But it still does fifty things poorly, instead of doing five things well. Great. My word processor can make tables, integrate with power point, display spreadsheets, use databases, do graphic-arts style page layout, embed media files, mail merge, and comes with its own security-hazard macro system. What about a feature the lets me type words? Which of these ten thousand buttons lets me do that? Here is how it went: 1. I figured that since I was using a ìfull featuredî word processor now, I might as well use some of the features. Having a nice chapter index would let my jump around the book faster. So I decided to stop for a few minutes and add chapters. Adding chapters took four hours. Paragraphs were turned into chapter titles for no reason. It numbered every chapter #1. And made the number part of the name. And if I removed the number, it stopped being a chapter. And sometimes chapter headings would appear in random fonts. Or abruptly change fonts during editing. Or clicking on the chapter would take me to the wrong part of the document. 2. I spotted an option to justify the text. I tried it out. Looked kind of nice. I left it in. I did a bunch of editing, and then I noticed that about twenty pages were completely hosed. Justify is supposed to make every line of a paragraph be the same widthÖ except the last one. For some reason, these twenty pages didnít work that way, and the paragraphs ended up looking like this: The quick sly fox jumped over the lazy brown dog. Nothing could fix this. I had to go through all of those pages and delete the line breaks between the paragraphs, and then add them in again to correct this. This was a mind-numbing twenty minutes. Arenít these programs supposed to be labor saving devices? 3. I decided to add page headings so I could see what chapter I was working on. Took twenty minutes of Google to find out how to do it. I did. I made a heading style, and explicitly said to apply the style to ALL pages. Sometime later I noticed that it had left a bunch of them out. Every chapter started off with the proper headers on every page, but then dropped them at the first hard page break. I did the ìapply this style to ALL PAGESî again, with the same result. Solution: Go through, find all of the sections with missing headers, and add them manually. Once again, the software is outsmarting itself and guessing at what I want instead of doing what itís told. 4. The crowning moment: Hey, whatís this screwy little doodad in the left margin? Looks like a formatting control. Maybe for margins? Letís see what it does. *click* Whoa! Thatís not what I want. Iíll just hit undoÖ Hi! This is Libre Office! Looks like Iíve crashed. Shit. Donít worry, though! Iím saving your document for you before I die. Er. Okay? But youíve been auto-saving every five minutes, so I donít imagine Iíve lost much work. But since this dialog only has an ìokî button, I guess youíre not really asking, are you? No sweat! I saved your work. Itís all good. Grumble. Letís restart and get back to work. Hey! Looks like I crashed last time. Iíve got a saved document ready for recovery! Do you want to recover it now? Er. Fine. I guess. Whatever. Huff. Huff. Huff. Okay. Iím recovering. Itís really hard. A progress bar? What are you doing? You saved a document, and now youíre acting like youíre importing something exotic. This isnít some foreign thing. This is just loading an autosave. What the hell? Done! Your file was recovered! Iím such a hero! WHERE IN THE FLAMING **** IS ALL OF MY PROGRESS? What is this? How old IS this document? Is thisÖ three days ago? What happened to all of those times I hit ìsaveî? What was that ìautosaveî you were doing every N minutes? Where were those going? Where is all my work? I SAVED MY WORK, and itís STILL NOT SAVED. WTF?!?!?! vader_no.jpg I was just short of 100,000 words. After the crash, I was down to 97,000. Three thousand words is a lot, but the real loss was the many, many, many edits Iíd done to early sections of the document. Iíd renamed things, added a paragraph here or there to clear things up. Re-worded things. Added a bit of dialog here or there to foreshadow / set up bits later in the book. The edits Iíd done represented a lot more than just three thousand words. If this was just a single section to re-write it would be one thing, but I canít even remember all of the edits Iíd done. Days of work. Gone. I Googled around. It turns out the auto-saves are put into a backup directory. The backup directory is purged in the event of a crash. Every. Single. Feature. Ended up damaging my document or eating time. And so: ï Screw Open Office for copying everything that sucked about Word. ï Screw MS Word for making such a mess out of word processing to begin with. ï Screw Microsoft for poisoning the well by making the .doc an industry standard and then making it an incomprehensible mess of obfuscation that perpetuated the use of Word in spite of its horribleness. ï Screw this industry which is built around this horrible software. ï Screw the stupids who invited this mess by complaining that their word processors should do their thinking for them. ï Screw the people who hired those dolts. ï And finally, to hell with Libre Office for destroying my work through a devious synergy of bugs and bad interface choices. I would have been happy to see to my own backups if I didnít see that ìSavingî message every five minutes, lulling me into a perilous false sense of security. If it wasnít for auto-ìrecoverî, I would have reverted to the last time I manually smacked the save button, which would have been a couple of hours at most. I still donít understand what recovery did, or what it was trying to do. (Deep breath.) This happened a few days ago. I havenít been able to go back to my book since then. Iím still mad and sulking. Some people suggested LaTaX, but thatís the OPPOSITE of what I want. (At least right now. It might be good once the book is done. I donít know.) I donít want to worry about formatting and layout and fonts and spacing and margins an markups. I want a nice, clear, easy-to-read environment in which to put the words next to each other. Even the headings and chapter divisions I set up in Libre Office were silly. I did those because I was curious and wanting to get to know the software. (And because I foolishly believed they would work properly.) I should add that stuff AFTER I type ìThe Endî, just before I send it to my proofreaders. I guess what I really want is a local version of Google Docs, which was exactly as much word processor as I needed, with nothing extra. The only problem with Docs is that, being a web-based application, itís pretty slow when dealing with huge documents. I donít know what Iím going to do now, but Iím taking a few days off from the book to let my head clear. End Of Article So do you see why I don't like word processors? They're nothing but trouble. They have always been trouble from the beginning. They cause more work to be done than is necessary. They don't help you to save time and they definitely do not make things easier either. All they do is make the big companies a lot of money and they're huge memory hogs not to say the least. Alright, before I close this case, let me provide you with just one more bit of evidence that proves that text files are the way to go. Blind People Can Benefit From Text Files Blind people? you mean people who can't see a thing on the computer screen? How can they benefit from text files? Well the answer is really simple. You see, plain text files because they don't have any specialized formatting and such are totally accessible to blind people who use screen readers on their computers. All screen readers whether they are paid or free can read plain text files thus making them accessible to all blind people who use them. So converting other forms of electronic texts into plain text files can make a huge difference in a blind person's life. It can help them in their productivity, such as work or school, and it can help them in their daily living just as well. Okay, so there you have it; all the defense you will ever need to convince you to use and create plain text files. If this doesn't convince you then nothing will and I feel really sorry for you then because you will more than likely turn back to using that dinosaur of a word processor that everybody and their uncle is still using these days simply because they're taught to do so. However, if you listened to anything that was presented to you in this case for plain text files, then surely you now see the true value in these files and how they can actually benefit you in the long run. So join the many hundreds of thousands of people who have made the switch from word processor files to plain text files , and then begin reeping the many benefits of plain text files. You will never go back. Text files will become your new friend. They will quickly become your best friend when it comes to accessing information because like was mentioned so many times before in this book, they can be accessed on all platforms and they do not require any particular hardware or software products to be able to read them. Any text editor and any computing platform can use plain text. Therefore, plain text is the most useable file format around even though it might not look very pretty. However, when it comes to accessibility, looks really don't matter now do they? After all, it is the information that is the most important, not how it looks.