Plain Text - Plain Text and Rich Text

Plain Text and Rich Text

Files that contain markup or other meta-data are generally considered plain-text, as long as the entirety remains in directly human-readable form (as in HTML, XML, and so on (as Coombs, Renear, and DeRose argue, punctuation is itself markup)). The use of plain text rather than bit-streams to express markup, enables files to survive much better "in the wild", in part by making them largely immune to computer architecture incompatibilities.

According to The Unicode Standard,

  • «Plain text is a pure sequence of character codes; plain Unicode-encoded text is therefore a sequence of Unicode character codes.»
  • styled text, also known as rich text, is any text representation containing plain text completed by information such as a language identifier, font size, color, hypertext links.

For instance, Rich text such as SGML, RTF, HTML, XML, and TEX relies on plain text. Wiki technology is another such example.

According to The Unicode Standard, plain text has two main properties in regard to rich text:

  • «plain text is the underlying content stream to which formatting can be applied.»
  • «Plain text is public, standardized, and universally readable.».

Read more about this topic:  Plain Text

Famous quotes containing the words plain, text and/or rich:

    “The Miss America contest is ... the most perfectly rendered theater in our culture, for it so perfectly captures what we yearn for: a low-class ritual, a polished restatement of vulgarity, that wants to open the door to high-class respectability by way of plain middle-class anxiety and ambition.”
    —Gerald Early (b. 1952)

    “Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.”
    —Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)

    “See where she comes, and smell how all the street,
    Breathes vineyards and pomegranates: oh, how sweet!
    As a fired altar is each stone,
    Perspiring pounded cinnamon.
    The phoenix-nest,
    Built up of odours, burneth in her breast.
    Who therein would not consume
    His soul to ash-heaps in that rich perfume,”
    —Robert Herrick (1591–1674)