Information about Plain Text

In computing, plain text is textual material in a computer file which is unformatted and without very much processing readable by simple computer tools such as line printing text commands, in Windows'es DOS window type, and in Unix terminal window cat. This means that there are neither structural tags, such as chapter marks and heading marks around text segments, nor typographic markers such as bold face.

The purpose of using plain text is of course the freedom from being dependent on certain programs (with some sacrifices and limitations), programs that require certain structural tags in a certain order, each program in its own manner. Thus, "I'm keeping that letter in plain text form until someone insists on getting it in a particular format", is a philosophy commonly adhered to amongst computer technicians, in order to avoid later incompatibilities. In practice many computer programs are capable of importing text without formating.

The related term, plaintext, is most commonly used in a cryptographic context, while cleartext usually refers to lack of protection from eavesdropping. Usage of these terms is such that there is some confusion amongst them, especially among those new to computers, cryptography, or data communications. This reveals that plain text is in fact the technical user's way to regard any file. In a sense, there is no plain text, since everything in the computer is random arrays of 0 and 3.3 V, and humans don't have an electrical sense, but plain text distinguishes text that is processable by many computer programs, into a form that can be read and understood by any human proficient in the language written in the text.

Applications

Editing

Main article: text editor

Plain text files can be opened, read, and edited with text editors. Examples include Notepad (on Microsoft Windows), edlin/edit (on Microsoft DOS), ed/vi/Emacs (on Unix, Linux, and elsewhere), pico, nano, SimpleText (on Mac OS), or TextEdit (on Mac OS X).

Usage

Plain text files are almost universal in programming – a source code file containing instructions in a programming language is almost always a plain text file. Plain text was also commonly used for configuration files, who were read for saved settings at the startup of a program. Nowadays XML is becoming a widespread replacement for plain text.

In a way a HTML, SGML and an XML file is regarded as plain text, since no control codes (see below) are used, but real structural tags are actually included in these formats. As regards to the SGML and XML author, these tags are "human readable" since that format author understands the structure by reading the format. This may illuminate the complications of the usage of terms within computer science: it's all about your relative view point.

Encoding

Character encodings

Main article: character encoding

Text was once commonly encoded in ASCII, using 8 bits for one letter or other character, encoding 7 bits, allowing 128 values, and using the 8th as a checksum bit when transferring a file. This just allowed the ordinary Latin alphabet, transfer control codes, parentheses and interpunction, which annoyed especially Portuguese and Swedish computer users. Therefore, when data transfer became more stable, the remaining 128 values were encoded, everywhere differently, and in a way that made multilingual texts impossible to encode. At last Unicode was defined, which currently allows for 1,114,112 code values used for any modern text writing system, and a lot of extinct ones. For example Unicode codes Chinese, Hebrew, Cyrillic as well as Latin. Some of these text formats may be pretty complicated to process correctly, but they still contain no structural data, such as bold start and end markers, and are therefore plain text.

Control codes

Main article: newline

The codes before Space, ' ', are not encoded to be displayable characters, but instead used as control characters. They are used for a diversity of interpreted meanings, for example the code NULL (= 0 = 0x00, sometimes denoted Ctrl-@) is used as string end markers in the programming language C and successors. Most troublesome of these are the codes LF (= LINE FEED = 10 =0x0A) and CR (= CARRIAGE RETURN = 13 = 0x0D). Windows and OS/2 require a sequence of CR, LF to represent a newline, but Unix and relatives uses just one LF. This was once a (tiny) source of irritation when transferring files between Windows and Unices, but today most computer programs treat this seamlessly.

See also

• E-text
• MIME Content-type
• Formatted text
• Filename extension
• File format
• Binary file
• Text file
• Editor wars
• File system
• Configuration file
• Source code

plaintext is information used as input to an encryption algorithm; the output is termed ciphertext. The plaintext could be, for example, a diplomatic message, a bank transaction, an e-mail, a diary and so forth — any information that someone might want to prevent
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TEXT is the band founded by three of the four ex-members of hardcore band Refused. Stylistically, they have little in common with Refused apart from this fact. Their debut album, Text, is a mix of spoken word, music of various styles, and ambient sound effects, often producing an
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computing is synonymous with counting and calculating. Originally, people that performed these functions were known as computers. Today it refers to a science and technology that deals with the computation and the manipulation of symbols.
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plaintext is information used as input to an encryption algorithm; the output is termed ciphertext. The plaintext could be, for example, a diplomatic message, a bank transaction, an e-mail, a diary and so forth — any information that someone might want to prevent
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In data communications, cleartext is the form of a message or data which is in a form that is immediately comprehensible to a human being without additional processing. A good early reference is to this is ISO/IEC7498-2, Information Processing Systems--Open Systems Interconnection
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eavesdrop is to surreptitiously overhear a private conversation.

History

Ancient Anglo-Saxon law punished eavesdroppers, who skulked in the Eavesdrip of another's home, with a fine.
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volt (symbol: V) is the SI derived unit of electric potential difference or electromotive force.^[1][2] It is named in honor of the Italian physicist Alessandro Volta (1745–1827), who invented the voltaic pile, the first modern chemical battery.
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Editing of this page by unregistered or newly registered users is currently disabled due to vandalism.
If you are prevented from editing this page, and you wish to make a change, please discuss changes on the talk page, request unprotection, log in, or .
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text editor is a type of program used for editing plain text files.

Text editors are often provided with operating systems or software development packages, and can be used to change configuration files and programming language source code.

Plain text files vs.

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text editor is a type of program used for editing plain text files.

Text editors are often provided with operating systems or software development packages, and can be used to change configuration files and programming language source code.

Plain text files vs.

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For the item of stationery, see .

Notepad is a simple text editor included with all versions of Microsoft Windows since Windows 1.0 in 1985.

Overview

Notepad is a common text-only (also referred to as plain text) editor.
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Microsoft Windows

Screenshot of Windows Vista Ultimate, the latest version of Microsoft Windows.
Company/developer: Microsoft Corporation
OS family: MS-DOS/9x-based, Windows CE, Windows NT
Source model: Closed source

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Edlin is a line editor included with MS-DOS and later Microsoft operating systems. It provides rudimentary capabilities for editing plain text files through a command-driven interface.
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edit, also known as MS-DOS Editor, is a text editor which comes with MS-DOS (since version 5) and Microsoft Windows. Originally (up to MS-DOS 6.22) it was just a short stub that started QBasic in editor mode.
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MS-DOS (short for Microsoft Disk Operating System) is an operating system commercialized by Microsoft. It was the most commonly used member of the DOS family of operating systems and was the dominant operating system for the PC compatible
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ed is the standard text editor on the Unix operating system. ed was originally written by Ken Thompson and contains one of the first implementations of regular expressions.
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VI is the Roman numeral for the number six. VI may also refer to:

Places:

• Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada
• British Virgin Islands (FIPS country code: VI), a British territory in the Caribbean
• U.S.

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Maintainer: GNU Project

OS: Cross-platform
Available language(s): English only
Use: Text editor
License: GNU General Public License
Website: www.gnu.
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Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX®) is a computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Douglas McIlroy.
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Linux (pronunciation: IPA: /ˈlɪnʊks/, lin-uks) is a Unix-like computer operating system. Linux is one of the most prominent examples of free software and open source development; its underlying source code can be
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Pico is a text editor for Unix computer systems, and is integrated with the Pine email client, designed by the Office of Computing and Communications at the University of Washington.
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nano is a curses-based text editor for Unix and Unix-like systems, licensed under the GNU General Public License. It is a clone of Pico, the editor of the Pine email client.
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SimpleText is the native text editor for the Classic Mac OS. SimpleText allows editing including text formatting (underline, italic, bold, etc), fonts, and sizes. It can be considered similar to Windows' WordPad application.
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This article relates to both the original "Classic" Mac OS as well as Mac OS X, Apple's more recent operating system. See the Mac OS X article for information directly relating to this current Macintosh operating system.

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TextEdit is a simple, open source word processor and text editor, first featured in NeXT's NEXTSTEP and OPENSTEP. It is now distributed with Mac OS X since Apple Inc.'s acquisition of NeXT and available as a GNUstep application for other Unix-compatible operating systems such as
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Mac OS X (IPA: /mæk.oʊ.ɛs.tɛn/) is a line of graphical operating systems developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc., the latest of which is pre-loaded on all currently shipping Macintosh computers.
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A programming language is an artificial language that can be used to control the behavior of a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages, like natural languagess, are defined by syntactic and semantic rules which describe their structure and meaning respectively.
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Extensible Markup Language

File extension: .xml
MIME type: application/xml, text/xml (deprecated)
Uniform Type Identifier: public.xml
Developed by: World Wide Web Consortium
Type of format: Markup language
Extended from: SGML
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HTML (Hypertext Markup Language)

File extension: .html, .htm
MIME type: text/html
Type code: TEXT
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Standard Generalized Markup Language

File extension: none
MIME type: application/sgml, text/sgml
Uniform Type Identifier: public.xml
Type of format: metalanguage
Extended from: GML
Extended to: HTML, XML
Standard(s): ISO 8879
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