Plain text files are multi-platform: You can edit them on a Mac, iPad, iPhone, Windows PC, Android, Unix/Linux, all without any compatibility worries. Although we are not sure at this time how much of the future is forseeable, the plain text format does alleviate all future and backward compatiblity issues. Plain ASCII text files, on the other hand, are universal and will be readable on any conceivable type of computing device that humanity will produce in the forseeable future. Often, the files cannot be read at all, or if they can, some of the formatting may be lost in translation. At the very least, the proprietary file format of word processor A needs to be converted into the proprietary format of word processor B. Each word processor vendor uses different formatting commands, such that a document file from one vendor’s word processor cannot be used directly in another vendor’s word processor.
Macdown citations software#
Word processor files, however, contain additional, invisible formatting commands that the software uses to produce fonts, text styles such as boldface and italics, bulleted lists, placeholders for endnotes, footnotes, and bibliographic citations, and so on. Caleb McDaniel has written in Why (and How) I Wrote My Academic Book in Plain Text, it “seems like the ancient past of personal computing is becoming the wave of the future.”Ī plain text file differs from a word processor file because plain text contains only the letters, numbers, and symbols that appear on a standard keyboard, known as the ASCII character set.
Macdown citations code#
All computer programming source code is written in plain text. HTML, the foundation of the Internet and World Wide Web, is a plain-text markup language. Plain text files have been around since the birth of modern computing.
What is new is that writers are increasingly turning (or re-turning) to plain text because they are sick of having to deal with complicated, bloated, expensive word processing software, proprietary file formats that constantly change, incompatibilities across word processor versions and computer platforms (including, now, smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices), collaborators and co-authors who each use a different word processor, et sic porro.
Writing in plain text is not new, and dates back at least to 1978 when the TeX computer typesetting system was created by Donald Knuth. This is accomplished using a text editor, a piece of software not to be confused with a word processor … Then one “hands over” one’s text to a typesetting program, which in a very short time returns beautifully typeset copy.Īlthough Cottrell was talking about printed copy here, he goes on to say that his remarks apply to digital documents as well. First one types one’s text and gets its logical structure right, indicating this structure in the text via simple annotations. I am suggesting, therefore, that should be two distinct “moments” in the production of a printed text using a computer. This concept was described in 1999 by Allin Cottrell: With the plain text workflow, you work in plain text, and all of those other document formats are outputs from your plain text source document. However, your original words are captured in one or more plain text files, which remain the source from which various other document formats flow. You might also bring this translated file into your word processor to continue tweaking the formatting. Then, using freely-available software such as pandoc, you translate your plain text document into whatever file format you need to provide (to a colleague, reviewer, literary agent, journal editor, blog post, email, website, etc.), be it Microsoft Word, LibreOffice, PDF, HTML, or whatever. You initially capture your words using a plain text editor, perhaps using a lightweight formatting language like Markdown. The idea of the plain text workflow is that you separate the act of writing from that of producing a formatted, typeset final document. Mind you, I said writing, not typesetting or formatting, which is a major part of what word processors do. The Plain Text Workflow is an alternative to writing with a word processor.
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