A Plain Defense For Plain Text

Written by Donald L. Brown Jr. All rights reserved.

Please note, you may not freely redistribute this book. You do not have giveaway or resale rights.

Important Notice Not all of the content in this book was personally written by the author and therefore is properly sited for reference purposes.

From The Author

Hello, my name is Donald Brown. Chances are, that you have not heard of me before. I am not in the inner circles of Internet marketing or writing. However, I have a strong point to make here concerning plain text files and why I believe that you should create and use them.

I myself am legally blind and I use a screen reader to access things on the computer, and plain text for me has truly revolutionized the way that I take care of things these days. However, I realize that the majority of you are probably using Microsoft Word simply because that's the program that you were taught to use for all your writing and so on. Now as a rule, I don't like Microsoft Word at all. I personally think that the program is too busy for its own good.

However, , since I realize that the majority of you are Microsoft Word users, I won't badger you to death about using it. I will instead, stick to my guns concerning plain text, and hopefully get you to see the power and flexibility of using plain text along with Microsoft word and so on.

Now you may be asking; why do I hate Microsoft Word so much? What is it about Microsoft Word that bugs the hell out of me and makes me furious every time I go to use it? Well, for one thing, I don't have Microsoft Word on this computer that I am using now, but I did have it on my previous machine, and let me tell you; that program was a real nightmare to use.

For starters, the main reason why I don't like using Microsoft Word is the fact that it does too many things at once and it assumes that you want to do something when you don't. It seams to have a mind of its own. Not only that, but the file format that it creates and uses is just too bulky and full of extra junk that isn't even readable by human beings but instead, is only readable by Microsoft Word itself or another program that is similar.

Looking back over the years, I have seen a lot of word processing programs come and go along with their over complicated file formats. And now, those older file formats are no longer readable so that means that if you did all your work in those formats, then your work is forever lost. That is; unless you were smart and saved backup copies in plain text which most people didn't do.

Even today, when people use Microsoft Word, they just save in that format and call it a day not realizing what could possibly happen some day with their hard work. This is just another reason why I hate Microsoft Word because so many people are forced to use it. They have all gotten into the habit of using Word for just about everything that they do including creating grocery lists.

Now here again, I am not judging you if you use Microsoft Word because that is the habit you have gotten into. However, what you need to realize here is that Microsoft Word isn't the final word on document production, and even though it may have become the so-called defacto standard for producing documents, it isn't the best option.

I sincerely hope that by the time you have finished reading this book, you will have a much better appreciation for plain text files. I have been using them for years, and I have to say that I have never regretted it one bit. Also in this book, you will learn about others who also love using plain text for whatever reason, but as you can plainly see, the evidence is clear. Plain text just works! So grab yourself a snak, something to drink because we have a whole lot of ground to cover concerning plain text and I don't want you to miss a single thing. Sure this is a very long read, but it is well worth it.

Why I Use Plain Text

To be brutally honest here and to be fare, let me explain why I use plain text instead of Microsoft Word documents. Perhaps the simplest answer that I can give here is that plain text is pure simple. With plain text, I do not have to worry about whether an individual is able to read the file or not because anybody who receives a plain text file from me will be able to read it no matter what operating system they use whereas with a Microsoft Word document, I am assuming that the individual even has Microsoft Word on their system. That's the problem that everybody has when they send someone a Microsoft Word document as an attachment to their emails. They assume that the person on the opposite end also has Microsoft Word. However, you shouldn't make assumptions.

I use plain text because it is the simplest form of written digital communication, and even though the plain text might not have all of the font styles, paragraph formatting and so on, I at least know that the one on the opposite end who is receiving it can read it with no trouble whatsoever. However, if I were to send a Microsoft Word document, then I am assuming that the person on the opposite end receives the email attachment also has the capability of reading Microsoft Word documents, and quite frankly, that's a huge assumption.

My Little Experiment

Below is a little experiment that I had done by just writing two words in a file. One version of the file was a Microsoft Word DOC file, and the other was a plain text file. Here are the results of that experiment.

The file that I created was a file containing only two words, (hello world). as you will see from the results below, the file size between the Microsoft Word version and the plain text version are really quite different.

Hello World.doc 791 bytes

Hello World.txt 11 bytes

Now both of these files are exactly the same with no extra spaces or added fonts. They were created using a program called Jarte, which is a free word processor that can save files in DOC format as well as plain text format. So now you're probably wondering what is the difference between the DOC file above and the plain text version of that same file? Well here's the answer.

The DOC version of the Hello World file contains a lot of control characters such as the font that was used, and other information that is native to the Microsoft Word environment that make the document only viewable in software that can only view or edit Microsoft Word documents.

The plain text version only contains the words, "hello world" and nothing else. There are no control characters, no programming codes of any kind whatsoever. It is just raw plain text that can be opened inside any piece of software that is able to view and edit text files including all word processing programs and text editors alike. As you can see from the example above, plain text files take up far less space than their Microsoft Word counterparts do, even if the file only consists of just two words. That says a lot especially when it comes to file storage capabilities and actual content that is inside the file for human observation. This is because Microsoft Word documents carry with them a whole lot of extra baggage that isn't readable by human beings but only understood by word processing programs. And with that, the Word version of hello world carries with it stuff that human beings can't even really benefit from accept for the fact that all those extra elements inside the hello world file are for displaying those two words inside the word processing program. In other words, it is all about the eye candy.

Text files on the otherhand contain total usable information without any extra baggage making them much easier for viewing and file storage. Not only this, but text files do not contain any useless or wasted information that isn't readable by humans.

End of experiment

Future Proofing and Longevity Of Information

Text files have been around for as long as people have been able to type words on a computer. A matter of fact, the plain text file was the first document file format long before there were word processing programs. Word processing programs came later on, and when they came along, the term Desktop Publishing was entered into our vocabulary.

You see, before there were word processing programs, documents were sent to what was known as a type setter whose job it was to put the information into the desired font, and to make the document look a certain way to the reader. However, since word processors came along, the individual sitting at his or her computer could do that on the computer and didn't have to worry about sending the document to a type setter. That's because the word processor handled all of the fonts, paragraph structuring and many other things that used to be handled by a type setter.

However, now, word processing documents have become the go to file format for most individuals simply because we were all taught that programs like Microsoft Word were the defacto standard for document production. So now, most people use Microsoft Word, and they also send Microsoft Word documents as attachments to their emails and such. They automatically assume that everyone uses Microsoft Word on their computers and therefore, they send the files as attachments. The main reason why people use programs like Microsoft Word has to do with all the layouts, font styles and so on. These things do make the documents look much better, but this all comes at a rather hefty price.

Now while Word documents do look better on screen and print better on paper, the problem comes with the file format itself. As was mentioned, word processing files come with a lot of extra baggage that isn't even usable by people. That extra baggage is mainly for the program that will be used to open and display the document. Just as you saw in the experiment above, word processing documents take up more room to store than plain text files do.

Word Files Contain Viruses?

Yep, you heard it right, Microsoft Word files can actually contain viruses. This isn't to say that when you create a Word file yourself that it will contain a virus from Microsoft Word itself, but other people who are malicious have found a way to embed viruses inside Microsoft word files that are sent as attachments. Once you open the document from an attachment, the virus is set loose to do its evil bidding on your machine. The reason why this is, is because so many people rely upon Microsoft Word for all their document production.

Below is a really good explanation of why you shouldn't send Microsoft Word files through email. It was taken from the following web site.

https://logological.org/word

Please don't send me Microsoft Word documents

Most likely you have been directed to this document because you have attempted to e-mail me a document in Microsoft Word format. I would like to explain to you why I am probably not able to access this document, why you should reconsider sending Word documents to people, and what better alternatives are available for document exchange over the Internet.

Why it's a bad idea to send Microsoft Word documents

Microsoft Word documents cannot always be read by other word processors. The specification for Microsoft Word documents is a closely-guarded secret, and as such only software from Microsoft is capable of reading Word files correctly. People who use other word processors, either by choice or by necessity, may be unable to open Word documents. It is unfair to assume that everyone to whom you send a Word document has Microsoft Word, or to expect them to buy it in order to read your document. In fact, Microsoft has deliberately decided not to publish versions of its word processor for many of the world's most popular operating systems, so buying the software is not even an option for many people.

In 2008, the latest version of the Microsoft Word file format, Office Open XML (OOXML), was published as an official standard by the international standards body ISO. In theory this will allow the developers of other word processors to update their software to work with these newer OOXML Word files. However, there are a number of technical and legal problems, and defects in the standard itself, which make this difficult or impossible. (In fact, even the current version of Microsoft Word itself does not fully support the OOXML standard.) For this reason OOXML cannot be seen as a solution to the problem of interoperability; OOXML is also subject to most of the same problems described later in this document.

Documents produced with one version of Microsoft Word cannot always be read by other versions of Microsoft Word. Even if the person to whom you are sending a Word document does indeed have Microsoft Word, he or she still might be unable to read it. Because the Word file format is not standard and fixed, Microsoft can, and in fact often does, change it from time to time. As a result, documents saved with one version of Word often cannot be opened with previous versions of Word. Many people believe that Microsoft does this in an effort to force users of old versions to buy the latest version, even when they are otherwise content with the older version and have no reason to "upgrade".

Microsoft Word documents are not guaranteed to look and print the same way on every computer and printer. Contrary to what you might expect from Word's supposedly WYSIWYG ("What You See Is What You Get") interface, a document produced with Word on one computer may, in fact, end up with radically different formatting and pagination even when viewed with the same version of Word on another computer! The reason for this is that Microsoft Word will silently reformat a document based on the user's printer settings. This is bad news for certain kinds of documents, such as forms, which rely on elements precisely positioned on a page.

Microsoft Word documents are extremely large compared to other file formats. The Word file format is bloated and inefficient; documents are often many orders of magnitude larger than the amount of text they contain. Even in today's age of ample hard drives, a large collection of Microsoft Word files can quickly eat up one's available disk space. For the millions of people who still use telephone dialup for their Internet connection, receiving Word files in e-mail can mean minutes to hours of waiting for the documents to download. Compare this to the mere seconds it would take to transfer the equivalent amount of information as plain text.

Sending Microsoft Word files can violate your privacy. Microsoft Word is often configured by default to automatically track and record changes you make to a document. What many people do not realize is that this record of changes is actually silently embedded in the file every time you save your document. When you send such a document to a third party, it is a trivial matter for them to recover this log and see how the document appeared several revisions ago. Thus compromising or confidential information you thought you removed from a document before sending it may in fact still be accessible to the recipient. Indeed, there have been at least a few high-profile cases of confidential information being leaked via publically-posted Word documents.

Microsoft Word files are a security hazard. Unlike standard data formats, Word files can contain programming code which can be executed by your computer automatically when the document is opened. Microsoft's motivation for including this "feature" in Word was to allow word processing macros to be saved along with the document. However, it was not long before malicious people began exploiting this design flaw by writing Word macro code to surreptitiously delete random files or otherwise damage one's computer. As a result, Word files are now notorious as the vector for dozens of computer viruses. When you receive a Word attachment by e-mail, do you really want to take the risk of welcoming a proverbial (and in computing terms, literal) Trojan horse into your system?

Most of the preceding arguments apply not only to Microsoft Word, but also to other proprietary word processors, such as WordPerfect. However, Word attachments in particular are rapidly and unfortunately becoming more and more popular among Internet users, most of whom do not realize the problems they cause. Fortunately, the problem of sending proprietary file formats is not difficult to work around, and does not require you to stop using Microsoft Word.

Alternatives to sending Word files

Plain text

Unless your document actually requires special fonts or formatting, consider simply typing it (or copy-and-pasting it) directly into the e-mail you are sending. This way nobody needs to open up a separate program to read your document.

HTML

HTML is a text-based format commonly used for writing web pages and other electronic documents. Its ability to be edited and its status as an open standard make it ideal for document exchange. HTML documents are not intended to be displayed exactly the same way on every system, though, so if the physical page layout is important, consider sending a Postscript, PDF, or RTF file instead.

Postscript or PDF (Adobe Acrobat)

If you are sending a document which has extensive formatting and is intended to be printed out, and which you do not expect the recipient to have to or want to modify, consider sending a Postscript or PDF file. These two file formats are fully and publically documented, and programs to read them are widely available for a variety of computing platforms. Unlike with Microsoft Word files, Postscript and PDF files will always display exactly the same on the recipient's system as on yours. One important caveat with these file formats, though, is that they are "read only"; there's no easy way for the recipient to edit the documents himself.

Rich Text Format (RTF)

In cases where the document makes use of special formatting and you expect the recipient to edit it, you may wish to send a Rich Text (RTF) file instead of a Word file. RTF was developed as a standard data interchange format for word processors, and most popular word processors can read and write such files. RTF may not preserve physical formatting exactly, but unlike with HTML, it at least tries to specify physical presentation rather than leaving it entirely up to the recipient's application.

OpenDocument Format (ODF)

OpenDocument is another standard data interchange format. First published in 2006, it is a much newer and more modern specification than RTF, and as such supports a wider range of formatting styles and techniques. It also has the advantage of being adopted as an official international standard by ISO. Most modern word processors (with the notable exception of Microsoft Word) support the OpenDocument standard.

Converting Word documents to other formats

Converting your Word documents to one of the above formats is easy. In many cases, you can simply use the Save As command from the File menu; somewhere in the dialog window that appears will be a drop-down box allowing you to select the file format. If you want to send a document as plain text, a quick alternative to resaving it is to simply select the document text with the mouse cursor or with Edit?Select All, copy it to the clipboard (Edit?Copy), and then paste it into an e-mail in your mail program (Edit?Paste). PDF and Postscript are not typically in the list of formats Microsoft Word can export to. However, some systems are configured to allow you to produce PDF files through the Print command. To see if your system supports this, activate the Print command from the File menu and look through the list of available printers for one whose name indicates it produces PDF or Acrobat files.

You can help put an end to Word attachments

Besides not sending them yourself, you can spare others the grief of dealing with proprietary document formats by encouraging people not to send them to you. If you receive a Word attachment in your e-mail, please send the sender a politely worded reply indicating why Word attachments are inappropriate and requesting the document in an alternative format. So as not to waste the sender's time, keep the message brief, but include the address of a web page where they can receive a fuller explanation if they wish. Feel free to cite this document.

Aside: the problem with word processors in general

The purpose of this article is not to promote the use of any one word processor over another, but rather to promote the use of standardized, efficient formats for exchange of written information. To that end, please consider dispensing with word processors altogether as a means of producing written communication. An inherent problem with the word processor paradigm is that it conflates the tasks of composition (fixing one's ideas into words in a logically and semantically structured document) and typesetting (determining the superficial physical appearance of a document, via, for example, margin and font settings). This lack of distinction is a cause or contributing factor to many of the problems discussed in this article, along with a great number of problems not related to the exchange of documents over the Internet.

Fortunately, there exist a number alternative document preparation systems which enforce a healthy separation between composition and typesetting. Most of these systems are unencumbered by the problems of proprietary file formats, and can produce output in a variety of standard formats such as PDF and HTML.

End of Excerpt

So as you can plainly see here, sending Microsoft Word documents really isn't all that cool to do and it just causes more problems than what it is worth. Personally, I would send plain text because that's my favorite file format. It is totally universal, and it works everywhere without any problems whatsoever.

However, we're not even close to being finished because I would like to show you some individuals who use plain text for their everyday life. I can assure you that when you have finished reading this long book, you will more than likely come to appreciate plain text a whole lot more than you did when you got started reading it.

Looking back through my old files, I'm amazed to see how many word processors I’ve used over the years. I’ve 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. That’s a shame; some of those old words were pretty good. Although modern word processing programs can do some amazing things—adding charts, tables, and images, applying sophisticated formatting—there’s one thing they can’t do: Guarantee that the words I write today will be readable ten years from now. That’s just one of the reasons I prefer to work in plain text: It’s 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 that’s not plain text’s 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 everything—including this story—in plain-text format. Here’s how it works for me.

Starting on the desktop

I started writing this article on my Mac in Byword. Sure, every Mac ships with Apple’s own TextEdit, and it’s 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 text—in Markdown or not—to HTML, PDF, RTF, Word, and Latex formats. Moreover, Byword displays the word count, uses Lion’s 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 I’m 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: It’s 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 Lion’s 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 Simplenote’s own website or with Simplenote’s own iOS app, I can also view and edit my notes using one of the many Simplenote-compatible text editors. They’re 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 doesn’t 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, I’ll be able to open the file on my iPhone 23. After all, it’s 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 distributed 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 apps… We’ve 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 computer—alongside a variety of apps—can 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, nothing’s 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 it’s 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 I’ll 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 I’ll 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, it’s 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 I’m looking for without those organization tricks? Remember, this is plain text. It’s 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. It’s 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 that’s really kept me on plain text is the fact I can use it for everything I want to. I don’t 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 you’re 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 that’s exactly why I love it.

I have today’s to-dos right next to an idea for a feature film I’ll 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 I’ve 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 don’t have to. Because of this, my brain’s 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 doesn’t, and what I just haven’t 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 can’t figure out what to do with them at first. Of course, you don’t 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, you’re 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. You’ll 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. It’s annoying, and if you’re invested in an app, whether it’s a notes app or a to-do app, you’re often forced to pay out the nose for a bunch of features you don’t want. Plain text doesn’t suffer this problem because it’s 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 there’ll always be another, and they’ll never all go subscription-only. This is really important to me. I use plain text every single day for simple tasks. I don’t need anything getting in the way of me capturing text as quickly as possible. Where I’ve Abandoned Plain Text Of course, keeping everything in plain text, even with a decent management app like Simplenote, gets a little crazy. I’ve 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. I’ve 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 what’s needed. Even then, I’ll 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 don’t 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. It’s 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 HTML 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 to skim 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 – which was the was the very first WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor – 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 you’ve been socialized in Word (like me), you may disagree at first. But I believe that if you try plain text writing, you’re 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 don’t 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 doesn’t own a Mac), I feel somehow desoriented by all these buttons and menus. I’m aware that one can do exciting things with text processors – 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 Let’s say I’m up to crafting a blogpost (a marketing strategy, an academic paper, whatever). I don’t 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 you’re 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 can’t 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 you’re 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 – more than a cheat sheet: You can also apply any of the tags by clicking on them. You’ll 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, it’s 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 won’t take long until marking up a headline will come to you as natural as placing an exclamation mark. Questions like “underlined or set in italic?” won’t bother you anymore. Save Time When Publishing

So you’ve successively written a text. What’s next?

• You publish a blogpost.

• You add it to the content management system of a website.

• You create an e-book and publish with Amazon, Nook or iBooks. • You convert it to PDF and pass it over to your colleagues for their opinion. • It’s for a print publication. You send it to the graphic designer, and he uses InDesign to produce a leaflet. • It’s a diary, or notes-to-self, not meant to be read by anyone but yourself: The text remains where it is. • It’s a term paper for university: You export to formatted text, print and submit to your professor. (t.b.c.) There’s a lot of things you can do with texts. For many of them, using a text processor isn’t 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 you’ll 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 – 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 – with just a few clicks. So, if you haven’t 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 off sounding like a crazy person. Later today, I will be featured in an episode of Jason Konopinski's "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 what they say 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:

Although modern word processing programs can do some amazing things—adding charts, tables, and images, applying sophisticated formatting—there’s one thing they can’t 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:

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: • NO text effects such as bold, italics, underlining, centering, etc. • NO special characters or bullets (you can't use the Ctrl or Alt key, or the Apple key on a Mac). • NO tabbed indents (don't use the Tab key at all). • NO lines more than about six inches long (that's about 60 characters, in 10-pt type) — use the Enter key to create line breaks where necessary. Formatting You CAN Use in a Plain Text Document: • Any basic keyboard character — letter, number, symbol, or punctuation mark — in upper or lower case. • Line breaks to create spacing (hit the Enter key two or more times). • ALL CAPS FOR EMPHASIS. • Rows of one character to create a "line" (===== or ~~~~~) • 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 throughout 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 on 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 dilemma.

So while you're satisfying your educator's taste in fancyness, 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 ago 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 guarantees 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 literature 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 have 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 writer’s workflow. Here are five unexpected reasons why they rock:

1. You Don’t Have to Worry if People Can Open Them

You don’t 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. It’s not always possible for various word processing applications to open certain file types. If they’re plain text, you’re guaranteed that anyone can open them on any system. Plain text files have been around longer than many operating systems and they’re 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. They’re also smaller in size than proprietary word processing files, which makes them easier to email and share with others. And it’s easier for operating systems to index plain text files, which means they appear quicker in system-wide searches.

3. It’s 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. It’s not possible to say the same about specialist applications that use proprietary databases or formats. In other words, if it’s in plain text to begin with, it’s easy to migrate to a more complex application. If it’s in a complex application to begin with, it’s 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 aren’t needed until the document is near completion. When you’re 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 do—often 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 online—it'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 set—just 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 ideas—you 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 here—text 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 you’ve heard about it already, but I’ve 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 doesn’t 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. It’s called “Google Docs” not “Google Great Big Honkin’ Books”.

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 I’ve 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 I’d never use it again. It’s a stupid, buggy, pushy, ugly, bloated, nagging, resource pig. It’s 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 won’t 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 don’t need a blade longer than 2 inches and it doesn’t fold up on my fingers while I’m 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 Word’s kitchen-sink approach to features, which means it propagated a great many of the sins of Microsoft. Oh, it’s not as clunky and slow, and it doesn’t 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 “full featured” 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 width… except the last one. For some reason, these twenty pages didn’t 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. Aren’t 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 “apply this style to ALL PAGES” 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 it’s told.

4. The crowning moment:

Hey, what’s this screwy little doodad in the left margin? Looks like a formatting control. Maybe for margins? Let’s see what it does. click Whoa! That’s not what I want. I’ll just hit undo… Hi! This is Libre Office! Looks like I’ve crashed. Shit. Don’t worry, though! I’m saving your document for you before I die. Er. Okay? But you’ve been auto-saving every five minutes, so I don’t imagine I’ve lost much work. But since this dialog only has an “ok” button, I guess you’re not really asking, are you? No sweat! I saved your work. It’s all good. Grumble. Let’s restart and get back to work. Hey! Looks like I crashed last time. I’ve got a saved document ready for recovery! Do you want to recover it now? Er. Fine. I guess. Whatever. Huff. Huff. Huff. Okay. I’m recovering. It’s really hard. A progress bar? What are you doing? You saved a document, and now you’re acting like you’re importing something exotic. This isn’t some foreign thing. This is just loading an autosave. What the hell? Done! Your file was recovered! I’m such a hero! WHERE IN THE FLAMING **** IS ALL OF MY PROGRESS? What is this? How old IS this document? Is this… three days ago? What happened to all of those times I hit “save”? What was that “autosave” you were doing every N minutes? Where were those going? Where is all my work? I SAVED MY WORK, and it’s 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 I’d done to early sections of the document. I’d 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 I’d 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 can’t even remember all of the edits I’d 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:

• Screw Open Office for copying everything that sucked about Word.

• Screw MS Word for making such a mess out of word processing to begin with.

• 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.

• Screw this industry which is built around this horrible software.

• Screw the stupids who invited this mess by complaining that their word processors should do their thinking for them.

• Screw the people who hired those dolts.

• 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 didn’t see that “Saving” message every five minutes, lulling me into a perilous false sense of security. If it wasn’t for auto-“recover”, 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 don’t understand what recovery did, or what it was trying to do. (Deep breath.)

This happened a few days ago. I haven’t been able to go back to my book since then. I’m still mad and sulking. Some people suggested LaTaX, but that’s the OPPOSITE of what I want. (At least right now. It might be good once the book is done. I don’t know.) I don’t 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 “The End”, 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, it’s pretty slow when dealing with huge documents. I don’t know what I’m going to do now, but I’m 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.

Alright, I have one more bit of proof of why you should seriously think about using plain text. Have a look at the following here below.

The Plain Text Project 8 Questions Interviews by Scott Nesbitt

If you're a huge fan of plain text, then you will love reading this plain text file because it contains interviews done by Scott Nesbitt on individuals who love using plain text. This file was not produced to plagiarize Mr Scott Nesbitt's site, but to support it by showing you that there are many others out there who love using plain text in their daily lives and in their work and leisure activities. I have included this text as a part of my own project entitled A Plain Defense For Plain Text to support Mr. Scott Nesbitt and his work in plain text. Enjoy reading the exciting information below and who knows, maybe you will get some ideas for yourself from it. If you wish to visit Mr. Scott Nesbitt's site, here is the URL below. More interviews may be added to this file at some point in the future as I get access to more of them.

https://plaintextproject.online/

Eight Questions for Melyanna by: Scott Nesbitt | 10 September 2020 Welcome to another edition of Eight Questions For …, where I where I pick the brains of plain text enthusiasts from around the world and around the web. In this edition, I talk to Chiara Pasquini, who’s been going by the nickname Melyanna on the internet for a long time now. She works for a video games publisher and, in addition to her spare time activities (like drawing, writing, reading about science, and fiddling with software and technology), Melyanna also volunteers “for a non-profit, sceptic educational organization, which aims to spread the scientific mindset and critical thinking”. To be honest, I was a bit flattered to find out that The Plain Text Project helped Melyanna get back into using plain text. So, I had to interview her. Let’s hear from Melyanna.

When did you start using plain text? Given my long relationship with computers, it is probably more accurate to say that I went back to using plain text, rather starting from scratch. Over the years I have experimented with various tools for writing both offline and online, but I slowly moved back to plain text after finding the blogging platform Write.as. That led me to enjoying simple text editors more and to finding The Monday Kickoff. Through that, I found The Plain Text Project. The Plain Text Project made me realise how flexible plain text can be and how much more mind space I could free up if I adopted plain text more extensively.

Why did you start using plain text? I always had a website and a blog, and at some point I realised I was spending more time playing around with WordPress plug-ins than actually putting content on them. I also got annoyed at how bloated websites got with all the JavaScript and other unnecessary junk added by WYSIWYG generators. So I moved to Write.as for my blog, and re-wrote my website with just plain text and good old HTML.

What do you use plain text for? In addition to my blog and a couple of web pages, I use plain text for all my personal notes. Recently, I have started using it for taking minutes of meetings at work, and it is amazing how fast it is to take those minutes. They are also easy to read, share, and archive. I also like making small games and interactive text adventures with Twee which, ultimately, is an engine based on plain text. Recently, I set up a twtxt instance, which lets me tweet in plain text.

What keeps you using plain text? I find using plain text to be more convenient: files are smaller and work almost everywhere. It also helps keeping me focused on content.

Do you use any markup or formatting languages? If so, which ones and why? I use Markdown. I went from not understating why so many users would prefer it over using a WYSIWYG editor or HTML, to using it to format even my personal notes or work notes. It is very easy to read even as plain text, before you parse it into HTML.

What are your favourite plain text tools or applications? The beauty of plain text is that you don’t really need a special tool to write. When I am using Windows, Notepad++ is definitely my favourite text editor. On Linux, I just go with GNU nano or whatever text editor that is built-in with the distribution I am using. I do like Joplin for its Markdown-to-HTML preview feature, for backups and synchronisation, and to keep notes organised.

Is there one tool that you can’t do without? As long as I have a device, I can write! But setting up good backup and synchronisation tools made my life a lot easier, and I love being able to access my notes everywhere at any time. Joplin and Nextcloud are free, open source, and get the job done really well.

Is there anything you can’t do with plain text? Work and my volunteering activity often require that my documents and presentations look fancy, with added visuals and data. I also often need to make sure documents are read-only and get distributed and printed without any change. But even in these situations, plain text is always a good option for creating the bulk of the content I need.

Eight Questions For William Hern by: Scott Nesbitt | 05 May 2020 Welcome to another edition of Eight Questions For …, where I where I pick the brains of plain text enthusiasts from around the world and around the web. In this edition, I talk to author and occasional technology journalist/conference speaker William Hern. More than a few of you might know William from this article on his blog about how he lived his life inside a single plain text file. You might not know that his article also planted a seed or two for what became The Plain Text Project in my mind. While William doesn’t use plain text as extensively as he used to, it’s still an important part of his workflow. Let’s hear from William:

When did you start using plain text? It was quite literally decades ago! I was at university in Scotland, studying for a degree in Computer Science. Why did you start using plain text? The Sun workstations we had at university were very locked down and so we had no access to fancy applications for writing documents and reports. As such we became very adept at using the text editors we used for programming to write anything that we had to submit. Eventually, we were trusted enough to use the departmental laser printer and we could use LaTeX macros that would process our raw text and generate a half-decent looking report.

What do you use plain text for? Today I use plain text when drafting early versions of my novels. I write in Ulysses, a distraction-free writing application on my Mac and my iPad in order to crank out the words for the early drafts. Only in the latter stages of writing do I move the text into Scrivener. Inside Scrivener, I can handle rewrites and suggested revisions from my reviewers all the way through to generating the final product, in both ebook and printed form. Fifteen years ago, I was much more all-in with plain text. I did practically all my work in plain text, in a single, very large file. This worked surprisingly well and made it very easy to ensure that I was carrying everything around with me. I did find, though, that I had to rely increasingly on keyboard macros in my text editor to keep things manageable. For example, I used a macro to generate a timestamp to ensure that all dates and times were in a consistent format. Text files which are several megabytes in size are very challenging to keep structured enough that you can find things again!

What keeps you using plain text? Writing in plain text forces me to focus on the words that I am writing — there’s no opportunity to get distracted by the presentational aspects. Also, the simplicity of the text format makes it easy to maintain access for archival purposes. You don’t have to worry about getting locked into proprietary file formats for applications that are no longer supported.

Do you use any markup or formatting languages? If so, which ones and why? I learned LaTeX thirty odd years ago. I learned wiki notation about a decade and a half ago and in more recent times I’ve learned a bit of Markdown. All of them are quite minimalist in their syntax and so don’t impose a lot of mental overhead. This allows me to focus on what really matters: the actual words that I’m writing.

What are your favourite plain text tools or applications? I like Ulysses very much and use it on both my Mac and iPad. Dropbox plays a vital role too, ensuring that my text files are kept in sync on all of my devices. Data synchronisation might seem like a simple problem but in fact it has lots of gnarly edge cases, particularly when mobile devices are involved. Dropbox has never lost any of my data whereas the other options — iCloud and OneDrive — have let me down on occasions.

Is there one tool that you can’t do without? I’m a die-hard Emacs user. I find its scriptable macros capability very powerful — it’s an incredible Swiss Army penknife for text manipulation that I can automate. The keyboard shortcuts for Emacs are hardwired into my fingers so I make sure that every computer I set up has it installed. And one of the nice things about Mac OS is that the basic Emacs shortcuts work in virtually every modern Mac OS application. They’re great for keeping my fingers on the keyboard, rather than having to reach for the mouse!

Is there anything you can’t do with plain text? Let me tell you a story. About five years ago my uncle sent me an email with the text of a letter from my grandfather, while he was serving in the British Army during World War II, to his mother, written on VE Day in 1945. The text was interesting and I certainly got insights from reading it. However, a few weeks later he sent me a scan of the actual handwritten letter. What a difference that made! Seeing his handwriting, that I knew well from the letters that he had sent me decades later, made the letter come alive for me. I could see where he had scored out text and chosen to write other words. I could see where he had paused in writing, perhaps thinking about what to say (and what not to say). There’s a whole lot of meta-information that gets lost when you reduce something to plain text. As a result of this experience, I’m now trying to handwrite more of my personal letters and notes to close family and friends, rather than just send them an email. It’s slower to write and there’s the added expense of postage but I think that it makes for much more meaningful and sincere communication.

Eight Questions for Russ Sharek by: Scott Nesbitt | 07 April 2020 Welcome to another edition of Eight Questions For …, where I where I pick the brains of plain text enthusiasts from around the world and around the web. In this edition, I talk to Russ Sharek, who describes himself as: a classically-trained theatrical clown, variety performer, circus artist, show runner, troupe director, and most recently teacher of human silliness as part of a physical theater residency program. In addition to that, Russ drinks a lot of coffee and makes a tasty bowl of hummus. Oh, he’s also embraced the plain text lifestyle. Let’s hear from Russ: Note: This interview was conducted at the end of 2019. Due to COVID-19, Russ and his troupe currently aren’t out and about in the world. Here’s hoping that changes soon.

When did you start using plain text? At the turn of the century, I had professional-grade geeks working deep in the trenches of the dot-com industry as close personal friends. For them it was the boom times, and these server-hacking visionaries spent hours extolling the virtues of Linux and the greater Unix philosophy to me. Despite my protests, they eventually wore me down. To sate my curiosity, I took a few test drives on the live CDs they offered. Perhaps it was the artistic idealist in me, but I could legitimately see the magic they were hinting at. The notion that my tools could really be under my control was exciting, even if it meant burning everything to the ground a couple of times in the process of learning how it all worked. It was here I first encountered the concept of configuring a computer using nothing more than a text editor. That idea in particular was a conceptual revolution for me. Previously, I had been stuck in the same boat as anyone else operating a computer as a creative tool: fighting a dominance battle with a proprietary operating system which never wanted me to look behind the metaphoric curtain. The idea that a computer would do exactly what I wanted, even if it was a relatively suicidal request, gave me a respect for the power of both free software and text files which commanded it. By the end of those heady days, I found myself planning a slow and orderly migration to Linux as my new-and-improved computing platform of choice. Fate has a funny way of intervening. My calmly-crafted migration plan was rather emotionally accelerated by the discovery of an impending hard drive failure. A failure which my previous proprietary operating system, despite its many shiny and candy-colored widgets, could not detect. By comparison, my new platform was ugly and weird. It’s widgets were poorly matched, like the spots on an indeterminably mixed breed of dog. Fortunately, a mutt-like lineage tends to make a creature smart and scrappy, and it could clearly see my problem. It barked loudly, and I listened. As a result I managed to rescue something on the order of a decade’s worth of creative design work, project notes, writing, and adorable kitten pictures from a drive that committed the functional equivalent of Seppuku on it’s next power cycle.

Why did you start using plain text? Whether I’m exploring a juggling pattern or a paradigm for manipulating information, I’ve found the most effective way for an old dog like me to learn a new trick is to give over to my obsessive nature. If I really want to learn something, I have to take a deep breath and dive fully into the problem. Conveniently, my sudden washing up on the shores of free software had me absolutely sodden with text files to serve as both teachable moments and cautionary tales. By that point in software history, Linux had managed to evolve into something more-or-less usable. It was surprisingly well-behaved for something held together by good ideals and software patches. What could not be said about Linux at the time was it being in possession of more than a veneer of user friendliness. If I more than casually poked at an issue, I’d soon find myself forced to roll up my sleeves, fire up a text editor, and tweak some essential “under the hood” configuration file to fix it … Right after I read the documentation on how to install the hood for the problem to hide under.

Having the almighty power of root made me feel a bit like a mad scientist piloting a homegrown airship in a world known for hastily-codified laws of gravity. The learning process was rife with equal parts wonder, satisfaction, and anxiety. In retrospect, I forgave many frustrations because I knew both the ship and its captain were at least well-intentioned fools. At some point in the back and forth between clicking around cumbersome desktop programs to perform work-related tasks and this bizarrely efficient underworld commanded by manipulating text files, I noticed a growing bit of cognitive dissonance in my workflow. The tools I was using to operate my computer seemed ridiculously powerful in contrast to the supposedly efficient and professional ones I was using to run the rest of my life. Once that idea got in my head I couldn’t shake it. From there, it was a relatively small intellectual leap to consider the possibility that I could use these quantifiably better tools to sort out some of my real world, day-to-day tasks. One day, my fingers danced excitedly on my keyboard. They helpfully created a plain text file called todo.txt, and my entire life started getting simpler.

What do you use plain text for? The part of me that had previously found comfort in shiny, candy-like user interfaces seemed to suffer from something akin to trust issues. Like most people, I began my grown up computing experience clicking and pointing. It took a while to retrain those battle-hardened reflexes to understand that this new way of working was a good thing. Eventually, my itchy mouse-finger calmed itself and I embraced my new life as a digital Luddite. I settled into a happy rhythm where almost everything I work on ends up in plain text at some point. Being a guest star in other people’s creative vision means quickly interfacing with their crew’s existing methods of getting things done. Having our logistical information in a lingua franca that can easily be massaged into different formats has proven to be a (sometimes literal) life saver.

At it’s heart, my job is really about the skill of communicating effectively. During a performance, I use that talent to ensure my audience understands what’s happening. A confused audience is a bored audience, and that’s disaster for a show. Behind the scenes, the stakes are even higher. It’s my job to communicate what is needed in order to make an act work on a technical level. A misunderstanding there can create the potential for someone to get injured, or worse. No one wants an aerialist to not have their rosin, or a dancing clown with a gluten allergy to get the wrong sandwich. The devil is always in the details, and those details matter. Doubly so on deadline, so we take a lot of notes. I also write notes about things that happen in the clown theater workshops and circus arts classes I teach. Being able to effectively search those notes has helped me find new connections, ideas, and directions for my work. In our development process, improbable and hilarious things are constantly happening. We document the best of them, so we can reliably recreate them for our audiences. While there’s often video of technical tricks and finished performance pieces, the textual notes describing the idea reliably end up serving as the best explanation of how we got there. Clown theater is more than choreography. We need to know what the clown is thinking, feeling, and doing in every moment of their time on stage.

In workshops, I use my Hat Rack juggling routine as an example. I once wrote it out line by line in plain text. There ended up being over 150 pieces of story-critical information in the three minutes and thirty-one seconds of performance. Doing this helped me really understand every moment of the “Hat Rack” better, and I now recommend the same process to my students. Hopefully, some of them decide to use a text editor too. Acts, once polished, get strung together into scripts for entire shows. After a few excruciating attempts to wrangle these collaborative documents into being using more sophisticated solutions, I learned something critical about our creative process. Given the opportunity, we will waste a surprising amount of time reformatting and prettying-up a document that only exists for our performers and crew. We decided that this inspired energy could be better used to improve our shows, and got everyone in our troupe comfortable enough with a text editor to contribute to our creative ensemble process without the headache-inducing typographical choices you might expect from having clowns at the writer’s table.

What keeps you using plain text? As this rambling interview might indicate, I’m easily distracted and prone to going down weird rabbit holes just for the sake of exploring what might be down there. As a countermeasure to my easily-fascinated nature, I’ve learned to appreciate the beauty of efficiency and minimalism. Having a simple interface to my world is a bit of zen meditation for me, and it helps keep me focused on my creative goals. The possibility of Zen mastery aside, there’s a number of imminently practical reasons plain text appeals to me. I’ve read so many horror stories about artists losing access to their work because of a broken file format rendering their work unreadable, or their beloved creative tool becoming suddenly abandoned by whomever developed it. Remember that tinkering nature of mine? Early on, I put my faith in a few software products that weren’t the most reliable because they seemed shiny and interesting. When they ultimately failed me, it took a lot of work to reconstruct everything I had given over to them. It also further entrenched my skeptical and arguably curmudgeonly view towards commercial software in general, but that’s a rabbit hole to explore in another interview. Suffice it to say, I deeply appreciate the freedom (in all its forms) to use whatever tool I’d like to manipulate the closest thing the digital age has to a cuneiform tablet. That I can quickly sift through those virtual bits of clay to find exactly what’s needed in the moment feels a bit like magic, often produces some amount of poetry, and functions in exactly the same way improvisation is performed on stage.

Do you use any markup or formatting languages? If so, which ones and why? Like a lot of people who’ve gone down similar roads, I seem to live in some perversely-mixed flavor of Markdown for everyday writing tasks like note taking, list making, and short form writing. It’s just enough formatting glue to give my words some structure without my having to actually think about it. After a long (and at times tumultuous) relationship with WordPress, our troupe’s website was recently rebuilt from the ground up using a static site generator called Hugo. Hugo speaks Markdown more or less fluently, and so my web writing process is now happily free of the write-swear-reformat-copy-paste tango that came before it. As the person tasked to maintain that site, I occasionally end up using a bit of HTML and CSS to accomplish my goals. Using the term abysmal to describe my competency with these languages would be grossly unfair to the vast ranks of intelligent beings who have managed to learn how to be bad at hacking web code.

When it comes to learning new things, I have a weirdly masochistic tendency to gravitate towards steep learning curves and obscure skills. I have suspected that the difficulty of these less traveled paths provides some additional resistance that makes me feel like I’m accomplishing something more important than learning a silly trick. This predilection for banging my head against problems seems ideally suited to learning inscrutably complex things like LaTeX, which I recently started exploring. It been a fascinating intellectual toy to fiddle with, and despite my lack of competency I’ve managed to create some gorgeous looking documents. I’m hoping to eventually use it to create handouts for my workshops and other important looking bits of paper.

What are your favourite plain text tools or applications? This slow shift towards a uncomplicated means of creating has taken me a couple of years. Over that time I’ve often paused to re-evaluate what tools are best for my needs. Most of my initial choices were driven by familiarity and comfort. I started with tools that tried to simplify my tasks, largely because those tasks were (arguably unnecessarily) complex to me. As I adopted a simpler way of getting things done, I began to really appreciate more sophisticated tools. The sort of tools that get out of my way and let me focus on what I’m trying to do. The best of these elegant little helpers seems to share some common traits: They do one thing really well — Those friends I mentioned at the start of this interview are probably laughing at me, because back in the day I didn’t understand the value of the UNIX philosophy they kept banging on about. They do that thing well, but play well with others — This goes back to why I love plain text in general. I can send the output of a file from one program to another and do all kinds of things never considered by their creators. I’ve both solved technical issues and written poetry this way. How they do their thing is consistently well documented — The best tools I’ve seen provide their users with excellent documentation. Then avoid holding their users’ hands, because they assume they’ve read the !@#$%^& manual. I’ve settled on some programs that likely make me look more like a software developer than a circus professional: vim

If you go down this path, you’re going to spend a lot of time with your text editor of choice. This isn’t a religious debate or argument about which program is best. More honestly, you need something that feels like an extension of yourself. In my life as a performer, I sometimes experience moments where I’m not 100% sure where I end and my acro-partner begins. That’s the sort of relationship I’m trying to build with vim, despite its cantankerous learning curve. todo.txt (and connected tools) That todo.txt file I created is still in use today, with some improvements. I found a tool called topydo that’s terrific for wrangling my never-ending list of missed deadlines. I installed a tool called Simpletask on my phone. It comes with a widget that allows me to quickly add some text to my to-do list. It’s become my universal capture tool for half-baked ideas. Thanks to a bit of magic called Syncthing, I can enjoy discovering how badly thought-out these ideas are from any of my devices. git Despite countless articles about writers using some sort of version control to inspire me, it wasn’t until last year that I tried adding some to my repertoire. While I only kind of understand the full potential of git, it has already saved me from my own mistakes a number of times. I really wish I had tried it sooner, and my standing piece of advice to anyone who writes is this: Stop making weirdly named files like something.backup.original.final.2.doc and learn how to version your damned creativity. Your ideas are important, have value, and deserve to be taken care of properly.

As part of using plain text in collaboration with my troupe, we’ve recently created a shared private git repository for our projects. I believe there’s currently two scripts, a children’s book, and a terrifyingly out-of-date employee handbook in there. The text-based PIM of doom It drifts a bit from the purely plain text conversation, but I’ve moved my email, contacts, and calendar to text-based programs as well. Under the hood these bizarre monstrosities store their data in beautiful plain text: • Calendar: khal • Contacts: khard • Email: mutt We also have a Nextcloud server, so my phone gets to play too.

Is there one tool that you can’t do without? Ideologically, part of the point behind moving to plain text is that I’m not bound to a particular set of tools or programs. If something I like to use goes away, at worst I would have to suffer through finding a functional replacement.

Is there anything you can’t do with plain text? When I first read over this interview, I was going to cheekily say video and be done with this question. However, I recently used some command line tools to archive a YouTube channel in preparation for moving a copy of it the Internet Archive for more permanent storage. A critical part of automating that process was wrangling a massive metadata.csv file which contained information about each video in the collection. I suppose managing our photo archive is still a largely visual process, though all of the copyright and usage information is in text files.

Eight Questions for Rodrigo Camacho by: Scott Nesbitt | 19 March 2020 Welcome to another edition of Eight Questions For …, where I where I pick the brains of plain text enthusiasts from around the world and around the web. In this edition, I talk to Rodrigo Camacho. Rodrigo’s the chief commercial officer at a cybersecurity firm who’s also a relatively recent convert to plain text. Rodrigo describes himself as a productivity nerd, and his philosophy around plain text is very similar to my own. Let’s hear from Rodrigo:

When did you start using plain text? I started using plain text 36 months ago. After many years of trying different tools and them failing on me through sunsetting or too many distractions; I realised that plain text was often the best solution.

Why did you start using plain text? All the tools I used forced me to organise things in a certain way. I spent more time thinking about how to organise things and doing that than actually working. When you are hammering in a nail, the hammer disappears. As you work, the tools you use should also disappear. Plain text is like that for me.

What do you use plain text for? I use plain text to do all my note taking and for handling my todo lists. I also use beancount for keeping track of finances.

What keeps you using plain text? Plain text is super fast. There are no distractions. It’s easy to move around in a plain text file. Copying and pasting is a breeze, there’s no vendor lock in, and plain text is very light. On top of that, the tools are stable. If you need them, there are a lot of advanced tools thanks to the work of programmers. You can easily extend or add capabilities to those tools with a little programming knowledge.

Do you use any markup or formatting languages? If so, which ones and why? I only use Markdown. It’s easy to read in raw text and widely understood. From time to time I use mermaid for building flow charts.

What are your favourite plain text tools or applications? NValt - Super fast and simple. It’s the best equivalent to having a white piece of paper with a pen on my desk. todo.txt CLI - I like my teams to know what I’m working on all the time. We all work remotely so that’s essential. Todo.txt allows me to have day by day breakdowns that I can automatically forward to them at the end of the day. WorkFlowy - This was the gateway drug to plain text for me. I’m a messy thinker, the outline structure allowed me to think better. I moved away from it since I needed an easier way to just start writing. WorkFlowy forced me to organise right off the bat. I still use it to take notes on most the books I read.

Is there one tool that you can’t do without? Todo.txt is running my life at this point. I couldn’t do without it and all the extensions I’ve added to it over the years.

Is there anything you can’t do with plain text? Text isn’t going to do anything for you. It will only help!

Eight Questions for BizDevCon by: Scott Nesbitt | 18 February 2020 Welcome to another edition of Eight Questions For …, where I where I pick the brains of plain text enthusiasts from around the world and around the web. In this edition, I talk to a person of mystery who goes by the alias BizDevCon, a corporate intelligence specialist at a consulting firm. A long-time user of plain text, BizDevCon is in a lot of ways a plain text purist. I have to admit, though, that their level of purism is appealing. And that BizDevCon is a heavy user of Standard Notes makes them OK in my book. Let’s hear from BizDevCon:

When did you start using plain text? Around 1990 or so I guess, when my dad received the first “shareware collection” CD-ROMs for the early Apple Macintosh from the USA. I started with MacOS 6 Some of the CDs included ezines and ebooks. At the time this was extremely new and interesting for me as schoolkid. In theory I could even become an anarchist, but thankfully I never tried out what was written in some of those weirdo ezine or so-called “handbooks”.

Why did you start using plain text? I remember converting ezines with the Newton Book Maker, to be able to read them on the go with my MessagePads. Later, other devices (like the Palm Pilot III) and the internet came along. At this time I learned a very valuable lesson: only plain text files work on all computers and devices, regardless if they’re offline or online. I still remember when my parents disconnected me from CompuServe or the dial-up internet …

What do you use plain text for? Every bit of information I find in databases, registers, or articles I format and store as plain text. Literally everything. My primary storage is Standard Notes. Before I kept plain text as .txt files on a cloud storage and used BBedit to search for context. BBedit does not work on iOS and I use Standard Notes instead. As of today I have stored around 2,400 items in Standard Notes. I have a bit of mixed feelings of about giving up BBedit but time goes by …

What keeps you using plain text? Before it was multiple platforms. Today, it’s about keeping the essence of an article or website and being able to search vast amount of text.

Do you use any markup or formatting languages? If so, which ones and why? Been there, done that but not today anymore. I am forced to write reports in Word. Before that, I was a huge fan of LaTeX.

What are your favourite plain text tools or applications? Drafts for editing text on my iPad Pro, iPhone, and MacBook Air. Standard Notes on all of my devices. EmEdit under Windows 10, particuallarly for converting text from public registers into CSV or Excel.

Is there one tool that you can’t do without? Standard Notes. I am a huge #fanboy because it works.

Is there anything you can’t do with plain text? Yes, PDFs are here to stay and I have store them as they are. One cannot convert PDFs into text – end of story. Also, I store private notes for shopping and home improvement in an app called DayOne. I do not want to mix private and professional data on the same cloud service. I also use Books and Photos from Apple for ebooks and media content. Last but not least: I am huge nerd of fountain pens and still store some plain text in paper notebooks.

Eight Questions For Carl McCabe by: Scott Nesbitt | 14 January 2020 Welcome to another edition of Eight Questions For …, where I where I pick the brains of plain text enthusiasts from around the world and around the web. In this edition, I talk to Carl McCabe, a father of three who works in the area of scientific computing support for biomedical research. Carl has a background in the social sciences, and straddles that world and the world of tech. Thanks to that combination, he pays “a lot of attention to the influence of technology on society,” with an emphasis on “positive alternatives to the addictive and exploitative models used by the big social media companies.” Let’s hear from Carl:

When did you start using plain text? I first got hooked on plain text in college, when I started doing data analysis for school projects and web development as a hobby and part-time job. When looking for remote computing services that I could use to do my work, I came across a type of community called Public Access UNIX Systems. You can think of those systems as descendants of the early internet, when plain text was simply how you did computing. But they’ve persisted as a thriving (yet admittedly geeky) subculture that serves as an alternative to mainstream, web-based and app-based social media. As I spent more time on these systems, I realized that I could do virtually all my computing tasks with just plain text.

Why did you start using plain text? Many years ago, I read a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death, part of which describes most television content as prioritizing visual addictiveness over information substance. Without going into much detail about the book (other than to highly recommend it!), I’ll just say that it swung my pendulum far in the other direction. I started paying much more attention to the quality of information presented in media and purposely avoided media that attempts to overwhelm the intellect with visual style. By extension, that really helped me appreciate the fact that plain text forces writers to focus on interesting ideas and creative word choices to describe those ideas. So I started using plain text for utilitarian reasons, but I’ve stuck with it because it represented to me a refuge from the dumbing-down forces of mass media.

What do you use plain text for? I do all of my writing in plain text and only convert it to other formats when I need to share or collaborate with people who use other tools. I maintain my to-do lists in plain text, either as a simple text file or using a tool called Taskwarrior. Outside of work, my main email accounts are text only, both at my website rawtext.club and at sdf.org. And although I don’t do much blogging, I do use an old protocol called gopher that pre-dates the modern World Wide Web. It is a text-only medium where you can find a thriving plain text community. And on the various public access UNIX (and Linux) systems I use, I do a bit of chatting through IRC or other text-based chat tools. I don’t play a lot of games these days, but I like to point out that there are many great text-based games available, both recently made and classics from 30+ years ago. Hunt the Wumpus is an unparalleled classic, right?

What keeps you using plain text? The older I get, the more I aim to follow the KISS principle: Keep It Simple, Stupid. Plain text is simple and gives me the least headaches with everything I do on a computer. On top of that, I appreciate being a member of many text-only communities online. I find a lot of substance in the interactions I have with others there, and these communities seem like a far superior alternative to Facebook, Reddit or other mixed media online communities.

Do you use any markup or formatting languages? If so, which ones and why? If I am publishing something on the web, I will use HTML. Or I’ll use wiki markup if I’m editing a wiki. Otherwise, I use pure plain text unless I am doing something for work. Oddly I’ve never learned LaTeX, but I probably should.

What are your favourite plain text tools or applications? This is a really interesting question for me because I spend a lot of time using (and continually learning about) Linux and UNIX-like command line environments. Userspace in these systems is all about text files, and plain text is how you interact with the system. It’s hard to pick a single favorite because many of the tools are designed to be strung together and used in combination. So I have to cop out and say that my favorite tool is this Lego-like environment of the GNU/Linux operating.

Is there one tool that you can’t do without? My Achilles heel is my dependency on email. I mainly use text-based email clients, either Mutt or Alpine, depending on the system I’m using at the time.

Is there anything you can’t do with plain text? Image editing, viewing videos, and a lot of web browsing. Although there are text-interface editors for images, this is one task I use a graphical user interface for. Although there are great text-based web browsers (like Lynx), they tend to not to work well with most of the web these days. (This is a criticism of the web, by the way, not of text-based browsers.)

Carl runs what he calls a free social club online at https://rawtext.club. It’s for people wanting to learn about and practice skills with Linux. You can log into the site and interact with it using a a text-based, Linux shell. As Carl says: Although this may sound intimidating to non-Linux users, one of the points is to support people and give them a positive environment in which to learn. Some users simply log in to socialize, and others are working to build new simple, plain text tools that can be used for socializing. I’m on the system pretty much every day, and I’m always happy to interact with other users. We have several plaintext social tools: a chat program, a shell blogging program (shlog), email, direct messages, and more. rawtext.club is fairly new and still small, so it has a lot of room for new members.

Eight Questions For Devin Prater by: Scott Nesbitt | 03 December 2019 Welcome to another edition of Eight Questions For …, where I pick the brains of plain text enthusiasts from around the world and around the web. This time around, I chat with Devin Prater. Devin emailed me and shared his perspective on using plain text. To be honest, it’s a perspective I’ve never consider. Why? Devin’s blind, and relies on use screen readers to use computers and mobile devices. Using plain text dovetails nicely both in his daily life and in his work as a Technical Assistant in the Assistive Technology department of E.H. Gentry (the adult education facility of the Alabama Institute for the Deaf and Blind). Let’s hear from Devin:

When did you start using plain text? I started using plain text around a year ago. In a sense, I’ve always been reading plain text, because traditional screen readers do not show font information and styles, not even italics or bold, in any meaningful way. They can be made to speak italics on like this italics off, but that just adds more syllables to what we must wait to hurry up and listen to. Recently, Microsoft has added a mode into its Narrator screen reader which speaks italics, bold, underline and such using different voice pitches, speeds, and volumes, but they don’t tell which one means which formatting, and using volume can be rather jarring. Emacspeak uses this method too, and along with the actual formatting symbols, like asterisks for bold, dashes as list markers and so on, a blind person can easily create correctly formatted material.

Why did you start using plain text? As a technical assistant, I teach students how to use screen readers with Windows, Mac, iOS, and, if the student has such a device, Android. More often, though, you’ll find me working on course material. Around a year ago, while I was still an intern, I found a few problems in our Office courses — some grammatical, some dealing with outdated keyboard commands, and some dealing with concepts limited to only one screen reader. Yes, on Windows, there are three, at varying prices. Our courses are created and hosted on a Moodle server, so we have quite a few text editors available to use. I started with the What You See is What You Get editor, making small changes. Eventually though, I learned a little HTML, and started working in that. Yes, it was hard and took a long time. While doing so, though, I learned that there were enough non-breaking spaces to fill outer space, and that the middle dot (•), is the most awful list marker there is, and replacing that with

What do you use plain text for? I use plain text for just about everything. I write my course material in it, I write my journal in it, and I even am writing fan fiction in it. What keeps you using plain text? For me, it is simplicity. I love being able to have a reliable set of formatting tools which will, firstly, look the same across all devices and editors, and the fact that it will look good to sighted people who may read it when exported. Also, the fact that I can know when italics, bold, underlining, and headings begin and end italics on without italics off hearing verbose screen reader output, gives me, I believe, an edge over blind writers who use Word, LibreOffice, Google Docs, and yes, even Pages, and who must ask sighted people if the formatting is correct. Since I write the formatting, I know how it’ll turn out. Another point is that, surprisingly and ironically, most word processors do not have straightforward styles to handle things like definition lists,

Do you use any markup or formatting languages? If so, which ones and why? I use: Markdown Works everywhere, but has many competing dialects. Everything should use Pandoc Markdown, in my opinion. Org-mode Allows for great document structure, and one can export only one subtree, good for publishing only the chapter you just finished to Archive Of Our Own, which takes either plain text or HTML. HTML My first markup language, I use it if Markdown just won’t cut it. Yes, the aside element. I use them, as I said earlier, because they help me so much with keeping up with my formatting, they make good, accessible documents which even look okay to sighted people, and there aren’t any loose styles to worry about, just text. So, italics and bold can be deleted by simply deleting their characters, and headings can be made more or less important with just an adding or deleting of an asterisk or a hash (shift + 3).

What are your favourite plain text tools or applications? Emacs My text editor of choice. Emacspeak Makes Emacs accessible to blind users. Pandoc Converts between formats. proselint Helps me to not use cliches like a sneaking suspicion. Aspell Spell checker used in Emacs.

Is there one tool that you can't do without? Well, I could be cheesy and say my screen reader, because without it, I’d be unable to use the computer, although that is literally the tool I cannot do without. For me, though, it’s Emacspeak. I talked about it a little before, but it really makes using Emacs enjoyable. While other screen readers yap yap yap about everything, Emacspeak has sounds which play for events, like a word being misspelled, a new thing opening, a yes/no prompt appearing, the minibuffer being displayed, and even when Emacspeak has started up successfully. Yes, some screen readers, like Voiceover, have some sounds, but the screen reader doesn’t know what an app is doing, other than general opening a dialog or moving to a new screen sort of stuff. Yes, VoiceOver hooks into the operating system, but relies on API’s to tell it what’s going on. Emacspeak can look into the plain text nature of Emacs, and grasp meaning from it, and not just what an API might know. Emacspeak uses Emacs to know what a mode is doing, so it can not only speak brief, relevant messages about what is going on, but also play sounds when needed. Now, I don’t mean that I want a sound for every pixel change that happens in an operating system, but gosh I’d love it if animations, program actions, things like that made short, high quality sounds to make computing enjoyable for blind people like me. It really speeds up interaction, because short, distinct sounds are, well, shorter than a text description. There just only needs to be a way to find out what each sound means, and I’ll be off.

Is there anything you can't do with plain text? I can’t do email in it. Well, if Emacs’ email readers were as easy to set up, and, ironically, as accessible as Apple’s Mail app on the Mac, I’d love using that. But, having to enter server information for email clients, and probably turn on modes to allow less secure programs access to my mail, make it pretty difficult to even want to email in plain text, by which I mean read an email thread, and reply in formatted plain text below it. Gaming in plain text is also rather hard, depending on the game. Online games, like MUDs, are really fun, unless the combat is very fast, and things can just happen while I’m still reading the room description, and I don’t find out until five seconds later because screen readers read from top to bottom, left to right. I know, many blind people will shout but ma sound packs! but that’s not plain text, now is it? Playing interactive fiction is easier, because things happen one round at a time, but there hasn’t been much development of programs to play these games in, besides a little from Frontz.

You can follow Devin on Twitter. If you’re interested in having Devin review your site for accessibility, visit PD/Go. If you’d like to learn more about what Devin and his colleagues do at the Assistive Technology Department, see the E. H. Gentry Blind Services page.

Eight Questions for Steven Ovadia by: Scott Nesbitt | 08 October 2019 Welcome to another edition of Eight Questions For …, where I pick the brains of plain text enthusiasts from around the world and around the web. This time around, I chat with a person who’s been at the top of my interview list for a while: academic librarian, writer, and music reviewer Steven Ovadia. You might not know this, but Steven’s excellent interview series The Linux Setup is the influence for Eight Questions For … And what a great influence it is. If you’re a Linux user, or interested in becoming one, check it out. Steven approaches plain text from the perspective of someone who needs to get things done. For him, plain text is the best way to do that. In most cases, anyway. When he needs to be, Steven is pragmatic and chooses the best tool for a particular job — even if it’s not specifically geared to plain text. Let’s hear from Steven:

When did you start using plain text? I’ve actually been trying to remember in anticipation of this question. Back before the dawn of the CMS, I always coded my HTML by hand in a text editor — so at least since the late 90s/early 00s. That’s when I became aware that plain text makes certain tasks easier (and cheaper; you don’t need to buy any software). I remember interviewing for my current job and being asked what software I use to build websites. I told the search committee Notepad and they looked sort of impressed. Plain text never adds anything in to what you’re writing (or HTML-ing) without your permission. It’s very respectful of your intentions.

Why did you start using plain text? I love the simplicity. Whatever you type into plain text stays in plain text, exactly as you placed it. There’s no formatting. There’s no pagination. It’s just words. And I truly believe in the idea of focusing on words first and the presentation of words afterwards. I begin projects in plain text as often as possible, so I’m thinking about what the words mean and not what they look like. What do you use plain text for? As much as possible! I pretty much draft everything in Markdown and then convert it, either using tools built into my editors or good old Pandoc. I’ve written a book and a ton of articles in plain text. Also, memos, emails, and various workplace documents. Even lesson plans. To be clear, at a certain point, some of these documents all move into a word processor, but they begin their lives as plain text.

What keeps you using plain text? The simplicity. It’s easy. Everything I might type on has a text editor. It’s a simple workflow for everything. I’m sure there are situations where I need to work exclusively in a word processor, but I can’t think of any at this moment. Do you use any markup or formatting languages? If so, which ones and why? I love Markdown. I wrote a book using Asciidoc and was super impressed by it. I wish I had cause to use it more. What are your favourite plain text tools or applications? I’m not particularly loyal. Lately, on Linux, I’m using Typora, because you can print directly out of it and it has some convenient built-in export options. I also like Remarkable. On Windows, I use MarkdownPad 2. I’m not sure how often it’s updated anymore, but it’s fine for my purposes.

Is there one tool that you can’t do without? Probably Pandoc, since it makes Markdown so flexible. Or maybe Markdown itself? In terms of editors, I love them until I don’t. But as long as there’s a spell check and the editor can render Markdown for me, I’m pretty happy. Also, I try not to edit on the screen. I’m a huge printer. Which isn’t great for the environment, but which is great for my writing. So while it’s not really related to plain text, I couldn’t make plain text work without pens and paper. And printers. So that’s like five of the one tool I can’t live without.

Is there anything you can’t do with plain text? I spend a lot of time in spreadsheets and I periodically wonder what a plain text spreadsheet would be like. Probably not very useful, but at the same time, if there was one, I’m sure I’d try it out. Also, presentations. I’ve tried plain text presentation tools (perhaps you’ve even seen this article) but it never looks as nice as PowerPoint. And it’s like 10 times more work trying to avoid PowerPoint. This is my greatest shame.

According to Steven, his site is the Internet’s premier source for information about me. He built that site out of plain text using GitHub and Jekyll. You can also check out Steven’s work at The Linux Setup (mentioned earlier) and at LinuxRig (which features Linux news). If you’re a music lover, check out Steven’s reviews of blues, rock, and Americana in a variety of publications, including his own site, Heard Lately.

Eight Questions For Hiro Sawane by: Scott Nesbitt | 17 September 2019 Welcome to another edition of Eight Questions For …, where I pick the brains of plain text enthusiasts from around the world and around the web. This time around, I chat with Hiro Sawane, a web developer from Japan. Hiro and I have been chatting via email for a while, and we share similar philosophies and approaches to living and working in plain text. A couple or three months back, we both (at around the same time!) had the idea for Hiro to do an interview. Let’s hear from Hiro:

When did you start using plain text? I began using plain text daily in the late ’90s when I first started building websites. The idea of plain text code (HTML, JavaScript, etc.) being used to build the entire internet fascinated me. I eventually began using plain text more when I moved to the Mac and discovered BBEdit. It showed me the power of plain text, and I was hooked. But I didn’t go all the way in the productivity realm until three years ago when I finally got sick and tired of fighting a variety of quirks and lock-in that come with commercial solutions after trying all sorts of everything bucket apps such as Evernote, OneNote, and the like.

Why did you start using plain text? I quickly became aware of the potential danger of vendor lock-in when I began using a computer. I wrestled with file incompatibility among various software I used at the time, but I tolerated it for the most part. The real I’ve had it moment came when I tried to bail out of Evernote and ran into all sorts of export errors. It made me realize that I needed to eliminate software/platform dependency in my workflow to maintain all my personal data in an accessible way without relying on any particular third-party tool vendors. Plain text and web-based technologies are the only approaches that satisfied my requirements. Besides that, I became more subscribed to what I would call computing essentialism and simplicity. A plain text workflow fits that computing philosophy perfectly. It’s ubiquitous, small, compatible, and reliable. It doesn’t depend on a particular platform or app to view and edit.

What do you use plain text for? Everything. I keep notes and journals in plain text. I log communications with various people. If I need to save some documents in PDF, I always make sure it has a plain text version as well. And, of course, I use it for all my web development work.

What keeps you using plain text? These reasons: • It’s simple and light. • It’s future proof. • It’s compatible. • I don’t have to worry about what a particular software vendor might do to the data format.

Do you use any markup or formatting languages? If so, which ones and why? My default writing syntax is Markdown, but I’ve been writing JSON for some of the notes in some cases because JSON is readable enough and allows me to import it into various tools.

What are your favourite plain text tools or applications? On the Mac: • TextEdit • Typora • Visual Studio Code • Simplenote • Standard Notes On iOS: • Drafts • Simplenote • Standard Notes • 1Writer

Is there one tool that you can’t do without? Visual Studio Code on the Mac at the moment. I’m flexible, though, and I can adjust to a few other text or code editors as I need. I try not to be attached to a particular environment too much.

Is there anything you can’t do with plain text? Multimedia stuff (images, videos, audio, etc.). But then again, to me, plain text is the way to string them together (using HTML/CSS, etc.). I try my best to maintain multimedia in open or widely-accepted formats like JPEG, PNG, and MP4 (although I avoid the WMA codec for video).

Eight Questions For AJ Roddick by: Scott Nesbitt | 21 May 2019 Welcome to another edition of Eight Questions For …, where I pick the brains of plain text enthusiasts from around the world and around the web. This time around, I chat with student AJ Roddick. AJ got in touch with me via my contact form to tell me how much he enjoys reading this site. Yeah, I like a little praise now and then … Even though AJ claimed that he’s no one special, from what he wrote I thought he’d be a good interview subject. And he agreed! Let’s hear from AJ:

When did you start using plain text? I made the transition to plain text in late 2018, around September I believe. Why did you start using plain text? I was giving myself a headache looking for the perfect app set up and I was getting lazy with paper based notepads so it made sense as I’m always on a PC of some sort.

What do you use plain text for? Absolutely everything. I plan my day, log my workouts, track my habits and journal my thoughts.

What keeps you using plain text? Simplicity and speed are the two main reasons. Another reason is that plain text has stood the test of time and it’s not going anywhere. You can just edit them on the fly and add to them, there’s no ifs or buts.

Do you use any markup or formatting languages? If so, which ones and why? Not really. I use the todo.txt for my to-do lists, which has an “unofficial” syntax of its own. I have written some other notes formatted with Markdown.

What are your favourite plain text tools or applications? Sublime Text is my main editor of choice. I use Editorial on my phone and use Dropbox to sync across my devices.

Is there one tool that you can’t do without? Dropbox is what syncs everything, so probably that. I’d use any text editor thrown at me, I’m just comfortable with Sublime.

Is there anything you can’t do with plain text? Not that I’ve discovered yet. I use a text-based calendar file now, although I sometimes miss my Google Calendar reminders. That’s about it.

Eight Questions For Nathaniel Leveck by: Scott Nesbitt | 15 January 2019 Welcome to another edition of Eight Questions For …, where I pick the brains of plain text enthusiasts from around the world and around the web. This time around, I chat with Wyoming resident Nathaniel Leveck. Nathan’s had a varied career: over the last 14 years, working for an oilfield services company as lead in the electronic maintenance department. Before that, he was a computer programmer. What I find interesting about Nathan’s use of plain text is that he goes portable with a device running Palm OS (I used to do the same; ah, memories). Nathan’s use of plain text is also cross platform, and he’s adept at using UNIX text utilities. Let’s hear from Nathan:

When did you start using plain text? As a child in the 1980s. I wrote programs in BASICA and QB45, which are of course text. I also favored using DOS edit instead of WordStar or any of the other word processing programs of the day. I have always been leery of being locked into a format that could potentially orphan my files.

Why did you start using plain text? Text files are ubiquitous. Opening edit in DOS, Notepad in Windows, or vim in *nix is simple and effective.

What do you use plain text for? Everything. I keep a journal in plain text on a Palm OS device and sync this with a wiki in vim on a Raspberry Pi. I also have running files listing my reading habits, lists, the many things I am researching in my off time, etc. I also have a phlog (a gopher log, at gopher://1436.ninja) and that is also plain text. I also wrote the official gopher front end to Project Gutenberg, an iconic organization that provides tens of thousands of pieces of literature in plain text.

What keeps you using plain text? It is future proof. UTF8 can express most of the written languages on the planet without vendor lock in. File size is tiny in comparison to most that you’ll find these days. You can carry around a large number of text files on any device.

Do you use any markup or formatting languages? If so, which ones and why? I use Markdown primarily, because it makes sense to me as is. I do not convert to HTML; Markdown itself is sufficient.

What are your favourite plain text tools or applications? My editor of choice is vim. On Palm OS, I like TealDoc, but also use tejpWriter to make sure the files are saved with a UNIX EOL (end of line). I also use sed, awk, grep, cut, etc. to manipulate text.

Is there one tool that you can’t do without? That would be vim and my Palm devices. Vim for when I am at a PC, and Palm OS devices allow me to produce and edit text where ever I may find myself.

Is there anything you can’t do with plain text? Correctly reproduce images. I am just not that good at ASCII art :^)

Eight Questions For Bryan Behrenshausen by: Scott Nesbitt | 05 December 2018 Welcome to another edition of Eight Questions For …, where I pick the brains of plain text enthusiasts from around the world and around the web. This time around, I chat with writer, editor, and teacher Dr. Bryan Behrenshausen. Bryan works for Red Hat and is an adjunct professor in the Innovation and Entrepreneurship program at Duke University, where he developed and taught a course called Foundations of an Open Source World. I’ve known the good doctor for a number of years. We bonded over the our mutual love of both plain text and open source. As an academic and a writer, Bryan’s always learning new ways to use and manipulate plain text. And, in the open source way, he shares what he learns. Let’s hear from Bryan:

When did you start using plain text? I really began using plain text in earnest when I decided to use open source software exclusively. That transition began some time in 2007 and completed in 2010. Looking back further, however, I think I can say my initial experiments with plain text occurred when I was falling in love with my first computer, a Commodore 64 my grandparents gave me when I was in elementary school. I’d meticulously copy programs reprinted in publications like BYTE Magazine and save them on floppy disks. Most never worked (or I’d impatiently abandon them). The C64 operated with the PETSCII character set (an ASCII derivative), so perhaps I wasn’t technically using what we today consider true plain text. But more important here is what I learned by working that way: the value and appeal of lowering barriers to composition (in the case of the C64, for instance, you simply switched it on and started typing). That stuck with me.

Why did you start using plain text? Since my turn to plain text coincided with my adoption of open source tools, it tracks with a period of broadening awareness of open values and principles. Because I like to write, I’ve collected many documents over the years (I save everything because you never know), and roughly a decade ago I began to see that archiving those documents in proprietary formats posed the risk of making them inaccessible some day. I’d rather not entrust my work to the caprices of the file format wars. Using plain text is a future-proofing tactic. But the more I grew accustomed to working in plain text, the more I realized the amount of joy it added to the work of writing. Like most people my age, I learned to compose electronic documents with an application called a word processor and grew up under the misguided assumption that it was the best tool for that job. It can be, for sure, but it’s a cumbersome and ill-fitting one at best, since facilitating writing isn’t its primary function. After all, “writing” is not “processing words”. Only after (re)discovering plain text did I understand the deleterious effects of that unfortunate confusion. I’m much better off now.

What do you use plain text for? Plain text is my preferred vehicle for accomplishing anything that requires working with words: organizing a syllabus, making a to-do list, making tests and quizzes, drafting a long email, keeping a journal, outlining a lecture or presentation, jotting notes—essentially anything that requires me to input characters with a keyboard. But I use plain text primarily for writing. And by “writing,” I don’t just mean “composing prose sentences”; I mean all those activities associated with the process of writing. That includes sketching notes, creating outlines, composing drafts, editing works-in-progress, and (whenever possible) sharing it with others for feedback. Very few (if any) of my projects begin life as something other than a text file (and those that do are most likely to begin as handwritten notes). I think my crowning achievement, though, is writing my entire doctoral dissertation in plain text. I wrote individual chapters as text files, formatted them with Markdown, ran them through Pandoc to concatenate them into the final document, then spruced up all the formatting to meet the graduate school’s stringent publication requirements. It was so unremarkable, simple, and mundane—something I can’t even believe I took the time to elaborate for you here. But it made me feel so badass.

What keeps you using plain text? When I want to work, I want to minimize distractions to the greatest possible degree. That’s just the environment I need (for writing especially). Any application that offers to do more than accept my plain text input is a source of potential distractions for me. Fiddling with margins, changing fonts, snapping toolbars so they are perfectly aligned — it’s all stuff that exacerbates writer’s block on a particularly bad day, and unfortunately I succumb to all of it. Plain text saves me from myself. Words have always been my preferred medium for creative work, so I tend toward tools that keep me laser focused on words. I recognize and truly do believe that any creative activity is the product of incalculable intersecting and overlapping materials and forces. But I will admit that I still do like to romanticize The Word — to entertain the myth of unencumbered expression emerging from deep within some amorphous, creative wellspring and pouring forth into a vessel. It’s a model of creativity that simply isn’t adequate or helpful (it’s actually rather counterproductive!). Writing in plain text fuels the delusion. It lets me pretend I’ve encountered words in their Platonic form. Much more practically speaking, however, I appreciate how uncomplicated plain text makes my life. Anything I save in plain text will open and render just about anywhere and at any time. It will shuttle between any system or environment with ease. It’ll back up quickly and require so little storage space. Working with plain text just produces this sense of incredible lightness; it allows users to live what someone very astute (though I now forget precisely who) once described to me as “a floating life.”

Do you use any markup or formatting languages? If so, which ones and why? I’m a Markdown guy, through and through. John Gruber created that language specifically for prose-style writers working in plain text, and he did the world such a favor when he did. Once I have something in Markdown, I can turn it into anything else my heart may desire (more on that later).

What are your favourite plain text tools or applications? My go-to tool for working with plain text is whatever comes installed by default on the Linux distribution I happen to be using at the moment (right now that’s Xed, because I’m on the Fedora Cinnamon spin). I try not to get too attached to any single tool so I can retain flexibility if (read: when) I move across environments. When in unfamiliar territory, I open a terminal and launch nano. To sync plain text across computers, I’ve found nothing better for me than Standard Notes. It’s lightweight, reliable, inexpensive, and (most importantly) secure. I really admire what the team behind it set out to do by launching it, and I’m proud to support it. I used to maintain my public notebook using Dropplets. It’s a databaseless blogging tool specifically designed to facilitate writing and publishing in plain text via Markdown. With Dropplets, I wrote a notebook entries in plain text, marked it up with Markdown, and uploaded it. Templating is simple enough that even I can handle it, so those plain text files look slick as soon as they hit the web. And because the software works without a database, all my writing is easily version controlled and portable. A dream. Dropplets is open source, and I suppose I’m also partial to it because it’s the first project to which I made an upstream code contribution (such as it was!). (Note: In case you’re wondering, Bryan maintains his public notebook using Blot.im, which I’m hoping to look at in some depth in the near future.)

Is there one tool that you can’t do without? My favorite plain text tool is Pandoc — a text conversion application that takes text in one format and converts it into another. In fact, I’ve already gone on record saying it’s my most beloved application in general. I stand by that. By using Pandoc, I’m able to avoid the kind of tinkering and overthinking that often stands in the way of actually accomplishing something. I can sit down, open a text editor, and make what I need to make; formatting is an afterthought. I know that later on Pandoc can spit out whatever I might need it to. It helps mitigate an obsession with foresight and lets me focus on the task at hand, knowing that I’ll be able to generate additional formats as unforeseen needs arise.

Is there anything you can’t do with plain text? At the risk of having you refuse to publish this interview, I’m going to say “footnotes.” Scott has for years been patiently helping me find a way to integrate plain text footnotes into my writing projects and is by now quite sick of my asking for recommendations. (Editor’s note: not quite yet …) On the whole, I wish academic writing was easier to do in plain text. And I work in the liberal arts, so my writing requires few equations, tables, and diagrams — those things that plain text devotees often have difficulty handling. Just as coding is possible in a text editor but easier with an IDE, so too is academic writing simple enough with an editor but much more pleasant with specialized software. Tools that treat clusters of documents as a project are ideal. I just haven’t found anything like this that traffics principally in plain text (a Plain Text Project, if you will) and, since that’s a prerequisite for me, every possibility has been a non-starter. The closest I’ve gotten is WordGrinder, which I will say is pretty great (albeit most appealing to people undaunted by command line applications, and I tend to perform most of my work with a GUI). Similar applications are nice but tailored for creative writing—brilliantly useful in that context, for sure, but not really drop-in solutions for academic writing tasks. But thanks to the interview with Michael Healy, I learned about BibTeX and am eager to experiment with it. I also just discovered Zettlr, which at first blush seems perfect for me — but first I’ll want to speak with my buddy Fedora program manager Ben Cotton about getting it accepted into the Fedora software repositories.

Eight Questions For Viktor Boyko by: Scott Nesbitt | 14 November 2018 Welcome to another edition of Eight Questions For …, where I pick the brains of plain text enthusiasts from around the world and around the web. This time around, I chat with Viktor Boyko, an IT teacher and SF writer (who writes some stories under the name Viktor Voinikoff) from Odessa, UA. Viktor’s journey to using plain text came about because of his need to be pragmatic. He was working with older hardware and couldn’t run his preferred software on it. He also gets a tip of the hat for using markup of his own devising to format his files. Let’s hear from Viktor:

When did you start using plain text? As a whole system, I’ve used plain text files since 2007. Why did you start using plain text? From 2004 I was experimenting with different notetaking systems because the GoldenNotes/WinOrganiser software ceased to suit me. At my first job, I only had access to an older 286 PC (with a horizontal tower and two really big Mitsubishi 40Mb hard disks), so for a few years I was working strictly under DOS. I got my own computer in about 2002. It was a very old Dell 486 PC. I got it almost free because its BIOS was on a hard drive partition and nobody knew what to do with it. With that computer, I was forced to use frugal and restricted software — Volkov Commander and DOS-Navigator for everyday work, and tools like Nettamer, Lynx, and BobCat for networking. My information system then was a bunch of text files. So, when WinOrganiser stopped working for me I began experimenting. I decided to return to text files but on a new platform, with a new editor, and with the use of version control. I was inspired by Merlin Mann’s article “Life inside one big text file,” the Canon Cat computer of Jef Raskin, and an article about Proteus notebook by Thomas Erikson. I learned Vim, started using SVN, and it worked for me.

What do you use plain text for? I keep almost all of my work and knowledge bases in plain text. I also use plain text for my daily journals — and keep them all in one bit text file. This system sprouted to encompass all fields of my work — including writing my books and educational resources. At first, it was just writing tutorials and manuals for students, then I began to keep my scientific work in plain text. After that I began to use the Moodle LMS which works well with Markdown and the GIFT format.

What keeps you using plain text? Simplicity first. Using plain text makes it possible to do many things that I can’t do with PIMs. You can keep very large volume of information and I find it hard to imagine Word or other text processors that can digest such a volume of information and not choke. Also I can use older hardware, but text still works fast. Utilities like grep, sed, awk are my best friends.

Do you use any markup or formatting languages? If so, which ones and why? I use a mix of Markdown, bit of Asciidoctor, and my own markup. My markup system grows and changes and evolves. When I was just beginning, Markdown wasn’t that well known, so I was forced to reinvent my own wheels Now, on the one hand, I strive to work with existing tools. On the other hand, some of my records are built so that it can be easily processed. For example, the records of my workout have a key line that contains a short record of training (date - distance - time - weather - tag), which makes it easy to filter such lines and build a graph on them. I can also use this setup to track weight, migraines, workflow, and more.. I tried to use tables in LibreOffice Calc several times, but each time I went back to plain text.

What are your favourite plain text tools or applications? Vim, Mercurial, and Pandoc. I also use Python, bash, and gnuplot for some visualising and for a bit of reflexive data mining. But Vim is what I always turn to.

Is there one tool that you can’t do without? Vim. This is one of the few editors that can quickly process tons of text. It does highlighting, folding, searching and so on. I also can’t do without Mercurial, which in addition to its version control functions allows me to combine all my working machines into a single space.

Is there anything you can’t do with plain text? Graphics. Plus sometimes working with plain text under Android can, sadly, be tricky.

Eight Questions For Scott Bicknell by: Scott Nesbitt | 16 October 2018 Welcome to another edition of Eight Questions For …, where I pick the brains of plain text enthusiasts from around the world and around the web. This time around, I chat with Scott Bicknell, a transit bus driver for King County Metro Transit in Seattle, Washington. Scott, in his own words, enjoys roasting coffee at home and writing bash shell scripts to automate tasks and enhance the desktop environment on my computer. He’s also has a very interesting philosophy about using plain text in the digital age, a philosophy I wholeheartedly agree with. Let’s hear from Scott:

When did you start using plain text? I started using plain text around 1994.

Why did you start using plain text? From late 1994 until mid-1998 I was an OS/2 user. Before that, I used Microsoft Works on MS-DOS to keep a personal journal and archived it on floppy disks. When I started using OS/2, I had a copy of Microsoft Word for Windows 6.0 and decided to migrate my journal into that program. The problem was that Word couldn’t read the Works word processor file format. I didn’t have the Works program install disks anymore and I had no program that could easily separate the text of my journal entries from the binary baggage of the file format. I found no way to get the text out of my journal files, so my data was inaccessible. It dawned on me at that point that proprietary file formats held my data hostage in the control of software vendors. To regain control over my data, I needed a universal file format. The only format I found that I could count on was plain text.

What do you use plain text for? I do all text composition and editing in plain text, and I keep my todo lists as a flat text file.

What keeps you using plain text? Plain text is flexible, portable, and malleable. I can easily search it and filter it when I need to find something that I wrote or mentioned and don’t remember where I stored it. If I want to print it, I can import it into a word processor and share it with others as a PDF. And if I want to re-use it in other ways I can turn it into various formats with Pandoc or paste it into a web page. Plain text works everywhere. Whether I am using my Linux desktop, my wife’s Windows laptop, or my phone, plain text files work seamlessly. And I can use any program to create, view, or edit them. It’s small. I never worry about text files filling the space on a thumb drive or my Dropbox folder and seldom need to worry about them being too big to fit into my computer’s memory when opening them. People used to write letters and send them through the mail, and many people kept shoe boxes full of them from years past. Those were often source material for historians when the people who wrote and received them were important, but they were also important to family members who wanted to know more about their ancestors. We don’t do that anymore. Everything we write is electronic, whether it is letters, as in email, or journals, which more often than not means Facebook posts for most people. If we don’t preserve our perspectives in a way that is accessible in the future, then what we say and think today will be lost. Only one side of the story, that of public figures and the news media, will be preserved. The perspectives of ordinary people going about their lives will be lost. I don’t pretend that what I write is important somehow, but it might satisfy someone’s curiosity about this time and place at some point in the future if they can access what I write. And they will be able to do that if I write it using plain text. I think we have a responsibility to future generations to preserve what we say and think so that they can get some perspective on the past that is not filtered by the media.

Do you use any markup or formatting languages? If so, which ones and why? I use Markdown regularly because it’s supported almost everywhere online and is easy to use, and Pandoc uses it as a basis for creating other file formats.

What are your favourite plain text tools or applications? Vim, Pandoc, Todotxt, SimpleTask, QuickEdit Pro. Although not strictly a plain text tool, I also rely on KDE Connect for syncing the clipboards of my desktop and phone. It makes copy and paste seamless between devices.

Is there one tool that you can’t do without? Vim. It’s the first thing I install and the first thing I open when I want to get anything done.

Is there anything you can’t do with plain text? Number crunching and graphics. I could use Links for web browsing, but too much of the web relies on graphics and visual presentation for that to be practical. And I could use something like Mutt for email, but why? Plain text is great as a base data format, but graphical interfaces can make plain text look good; it doesn’t have to be ugly or retro. I also wouldn’t do spreadsheets with it. Some things just don’t work well in plain text. That said, you can use it without having to give up presentation and style.

Eight Questions For Gabriel Rider by: Scott Nesbitt | 12 September 2018 Welcome to another edition of Eight Questions For …, where I pick the brains of plain text enthusiasts from around the world and around the web. This time around, I chat with Gabriel Rider, who works for an engineering firm. At the moment, Gabriel works with SQL on PLC ladder logic programming. He also codes helper programs (mostly in QT C++) to help himself and others in his profession accomplish tasks. Gabriel’s focus with plain text is quite techie. That said, he has a very simple but useful way of using plain text for his to-do lists. Let’s hear from Gabriel:

When did you start using plain text? About a year after I started Linux, I was trying to refresh my knowledge of C++. It had been a while since I had a programming class. I was just using QT Creator (a programmer’s tool), but I didn’t realize that a Linux terminal with g++ (a complier) for standard library stuff was much easier.

Why did you start using plain text? To be honest, because I became a huge fan of Richard Stallman and learned about the creation of Emacs. I figured that if it’s good enough for Richard Stallman, it’s good enough for me.

What do you use plain text for? Quite a bit. Right now in SQL, I have found that in some cases it is much easier to create certain queries (or at least the structure of certain queries) in plain text rather than in the SQL Server-like Design Mode that the database that I administer supports natively. When creating a word processor document that my colleagues or customers will expect to be in .docx format, I tend to make it first in plain text, then copy and paste the plain text into the Word document before formatting. When programming in QT, I use plain text about half the time. Sometimes it is much easier to use the IDE of QT Creator, but sometimes it is much easier to use the tools in Emacs to speed up the process. I also create daily task lists in plain text. When possible, I prefer to use Emacs SES (Simple Emacs Spreadsheet) to work with formatted spreadsheets than to work in Excel, Calc, or Gnumeric.

What keeps you using plain text? Simplicity. I just write. If it needs to be formatted later, then I do so. With word processor documents, I find that it provides an extra layer of proof reading and correction of the work. With C++, SQL, or any other languages, I feel that I know the language better if I can write it in plain text rather than using the IDE helper.

Do you use any markup or formatting languages? If so, which ones and why? No. I have my own special markups for my to do lists to mark items as done. • Multiple XXXs at the end mean that the item was done. • Multiple YYYs at the end mean that the item was worked on that day. • Multiple NNNs at the end mean that the item is new. • An item that is surrounded by () needs feedback from a colleague or customer. • An item that is surrounded by [] has problems or setbacks that need to be solved before it can be moved forward with (something out of my control.)

What are your favorite plain text tools or applications? Emacs for sure. Not just Emacs, but also Ergo Emacs, and my own custom Emacs Lisp functions. It has been hard so far not to mention, but I don’t think I could do any job nearly as efficiently without these tools. Ergo Emacs is recommended. It makes it much easier to convince anyone else to adopt Emacs if they don’t have to learn all new command for copy/paste/ etc. and everything is actually ergonomic as the name implies. Some of the custom Emacs Lisp function I have created do the following: • Generate my to do lists each morning (I know there’s Org Mode, but where’s the fun in that?) • Mark my to do lists. • Automtically generate a SQL IN function • Highlight a series of text by regular expression that when searching lists. • Generate a change log summary. • Create a series of SQL Like functions separated by a logical OR. • Generate a SQL SELECT function via user input. • Generate a SQL UPDATE function via user input. This one also creates a SQL SELECT function with the same user inputted criteria so that the user can make sure that the “UPDATE” function worked just fine.

Is there one tool that you can’t do without? Emacs with Ergo Emacs. I seriously don’t understand why there can’t be a word processor such as Libre Office Writer that has the same keybindings. I would probably use Emacs just the same though. When it comes to hardware, I have recently started using a GoldTouch keyboard. This, along with Ergo Emacs,has helped save me from a repetitive stress injury that I started to get recently.

Is there anything you can’t do with plain text? There are some queries that get really complicated. I keep a spreadsheet of all of the tables and fields in our database, as well as the table links and how the tables are linked (both with code and the Design View). Even with that, it is still difficult to see how tables are linked if I am using more than two or three tables. Most queries are not this complicated, though.

Eight Questions For David Collins-Rivera by: Scott Nesbitt | 15 August 2018 Welcome to another edition of Eight Questions For …, where I where I pick the brains of plain text enthusiasts from around the world and around the web. This time around, I’m chatting with David Collins-Rivera. He’s an indie novelist, podcaster, and voice actor. He writes the Stardrifter series of novels and stories, as well as other things, in both ebook and audio formats. While it’s not unusual for writers to do their work in plain text, most of the ones I know who do tend to format their work using Markdown. David, on the other hand, uses a tool I haven’t looked at in years: txt2tags. Ah, memories … Let’s hear from David:

When did you start using plain text? I’ve been dedicated to writing the first several drafts of my books and short stories in plain text for at least five years now.

Why did you start using plain text? After getting burned by a proprietary or specialized writing formats one too many times, which would only work until the next update, or when a particular library was installed, I decided that plain text with some simple markup was the way to go.

What do you use plain text for? Pretty much everything, in the primary stage of development. The first three drafts of my last novel, for instance, were produced entirely in a plain text editor (the one before that, as well). Audio plays are done the same way, as are short stories, poetry, and even the first drafts of longer emails.

What keeps you using plain text? Its versatility and reliability. I can create a thing in plain text, and feel confident that it will be as easy to open and manipulate in ten years time as it is today.

Do you use any markup or formatting languages? If so, which ones and why? I tend to use the Linux/UNIX command line tool txt2tags, which uses a very simple markup language for some basic formatting. From there, I can export the text file to a wide variety of formats, like HTML, PDF, DOC, and others. I often create an HTML or XHTML file for eventual creation of an EPUB for the ebook versions of my books and short stories.

What are your favourite plain text tools or applications? I usually write in nano, formatting for txt2tags. I often use the command, wc, for checking the word count of files, and the command aspell, for doing spell checking on plain text files. All of these are done on the command line. They’re simple to use, and extremely quick.

Is there one tool that you can’t do without? Honestly, nano is my go-to text editor. Without it, I’m not sure I’d know what to do with a computer!

Is there anything you can’t do with plain text? There are certain formatting processes, like page layout, and such, that really do need to be done with a visual tool. I don’t mind that: plain text does exactly what I need it to do, and the other tools do the rest.

Eight Questions For Michael Healy by: Scott Nesbitt | 17 July 2018 Welcome to another edition of Eight Questions For …, where I where I pick the brains of plain text enthusiasts from around the world and around the web. This time around, I’m chatting with Michael Healy. He’s a Kiwi who slipped across the ditch to Australia, where he’s a careers and employability educator at the University of Southern Queensland. Michael’s also pursuing his PhD there. Michael isn’t the first academic I’ve encountered who uses plain text, but he’s a recent convert. By his own admission, Michael’s not a highly technical person, but he’s skilled enough to set up and use the plain text tools he’s chosen. Let’s hear from Michael:

When did you start using plain text? Towards the end of 2017, Zotero (software for managing bibliographic references and research) released a major update which nuked my settings and killed Zotfile, an add-on that I relied on to rename my .pdf files, move them into a Dropbox folder (and out of Zotero’s own awful storage file structure), and extract annotations from them. I was annoyed enough to dump Zotero altogether rather than trying to reestablish my settings and workflows and I had zero taste for adopting Endnote or Mendeley in place of Zotero. Around that time I was also fed up with Word and Evernote, where I felt the features, settings, and various quirks were getting in the way of actually getting things done in them. I had read about the benefits of plain text on Lifehacker and had become aware of plain text academic writing, in the form of BibTeX and Markdown, thanks to a couple of articles I’d stumbled across on Twitter. I had a relatively quiet period of work and used it to learn the ins and outs of plain text, research and trial tools, and set up my workflows. Though you might call me a power user of certain software, I’m not a tech expert by any stretch of the imagination. At times, the learning curve was quite steep. One of the beauties of plain text is that you can always scale back if you overextend yourself.

Why did you start using plain text? In addition to being annoyed at Zotero and tired of Word and Evernote, I was really struggling with procrastination in my academic and professional writing at the time. I found myself endlessly fiddling with Evernote and Word, but seldom really producing anything or getting through my tasks. I was aware of Markdown and had used it a few times for brainstorming and outlining academic writing, and found that it gave me a lot more clarity, forcing me to focus on the words, not the margins, or the format of the headings, or the line spacing. The Zotero update was the tipping point I needed to dive in and build new workflows around plain text, after long having a general preference for simplicity and minimalism, as well as a distaste for software that locks you into proprietary formats and tools. Plaintext Productivity.net was an invaluable resource for learning the ins and outs of plain text, along with the Plain Text Project and Nicholas Cifuentes-Goodbody’s Youtube channel.

What do you use plain text for? I mainly use it for academic and professional writing. My articles, essays, and reports start as Markdown files, into which I sketch out a skeleton and paste any starting material I have. That can be notes, quotes, braindumps, plans, emails, and twitter posts. I call this stuff compost: miscellanous text that has been sitting around fermenting and is finally proving itself useful. I work in the Markdown file until it’s ready to be shared for feedback or collaboration, which is when I will convert it to .docx. Editing the document after that depends on the size and intensity of the edits. Minor ones just get done in Word, while more significant edits will be manually integrated into the original Markdown file. I actually appreciate this manual step as it forces me to be more intentional and careful with my edits, rather than lazily clicking accept change. I’ve been keeping larger note files — like plans, outlines, and reading notes — as standalone Markdown files, typically in project-specific folders in Dropbox. But I’m not entirely happy with that as it means that my notes are dispersed throughout several folders and I have to manually move them into a new project if I’ll be using them again. So I’m making an effort now to keep my notes in ResophNotes. I also have been making some efforts to maintain my todo list in plain text, which I struggle with as I enjoy some features of dedicated todo platforms, such as calendar integration, drag and drop interfaces, and filtering.

What keeps you using plain text? It works. It has done more than anything else to kick start my writing productivity, because I am so much more focused on making words appear on the screen. It is fast to open, easy to use across devices, and I have the confidence that if one machine blows up or one piece of software fails, I can still access my files without any trouble. The other day, I wanted to share a citation with someone I was talking to in the pub: I just opened my BibTeX file from Dropbox on my phone and found it with a text search in less than a minute.

Do you use any markup or formatting languages? If so, which ones and why? I use Pandoc Markdown, which has all the basic functions of markdown but also includes markdown for citations, using BibTeX keys. So, if I type [@Guichard2001], the correct APA style citation will be added once I convert the file with Pandoc, along with the full reference at the end of the file. I’ve been testing out a few markup languages in Sublime Text for my todo lists, such as Todo.txt and Org-mode, but haven’t quite found my holy grail yet.

What are your favourite plain text tools or applications? Jabref for maintaining my bibtex files and the attached PDF files. Sublime Text for writing, with some key packages: • Markdown Editing, for syntax highlighting, markdown pairing, and so on. • Markdown Preview, to make up for the lack of a live preview capability. • Citer, which calls up a search of my bibtex file and inserts the bibtex key of the selected source. • Pandoc, to run pandoc conversions from within Sublime Text, rather than using the command line. ResophNotes for note taking and todos. This is a work in progress, but I am finding that I prefer dynamic searching over too-complex tagging and folder systems. It remains to be seen how this sticks, but it’s doing well so far.

Is there one tool that you can’t do without? Pandoc, particularly its ability to generate citations and reference lists. It is what made it possible for me to ditch Zotero and Word and not look back.

Is there anything you can’t do with plain text? There are two things, but neither is due to limitations in plain text itself, rather they reflect the limits of my own and others’ skills and workflows. Firstly, it’s hard to collaborate on a writing project with my colleagues, most of which are wedded to Word and Endnote. I find myself working in Word in the later stages of a collaborative writing project much more than I would like to, and I often have to get someone else to add citations, because messing with Endnote fields in Word is a bad idea if you’re not using it yourself. Secondly, I am yet to tackle using Git for version control and writing project management. There’s been a few times when I’ve lost a good bit of text due to saving before pasting, so I do think I need to knuckle down and learn how to use Git soon, especially as my doctoral research grows in complexity.

Eight Questions for [not]Klaatu by: Scott Nesbitt | 14 June 2018 Welcome to this edition of Eight Questions For…, where I pick the brains of plain text enthusiasts from around the world and around the web. This month, I’m chatting with talented internet man of mystery [not]Klaatu. [not]Klaatu describes himself as a nerd who stumbled into computing by way of dropping out of film school. His interest span the artistic and the techie — he writes, podcasts, programs, and tries to stay out of noticeable trouble. At the core of everything he does, though, is plain text. He gets bonus points for mainlining DocBook (an old favourite of mine). Let’s hear from [not]Klaatu:

When did you start using plain text? I grew up with plain text because I didn’t know the difference, but eventually I unfortunately discovered word processors and started using those. It didn’t take me too long to see weaknesses in word processors: they were always trying to fix things for me, and no matter what I did, it seemed their formatting was strangely impermanent. I felt it was an uphill battle, trying to format what I wanted my final product to look like, but at the same time edit the copy to get the words right. Without knowing how to express it, I’d discovered that I needed to separate content from style. It wasn’t fun at the time, but I’m very lucky to have suffered a few catastrophic file corruptions, in which I lost a bulk of what I had produced as a teenager. Around the same time, the company that made the word processor application also ceased support for it, and so I finally realised that plain text just plain made sense.

Why did you start using plain text? Aside from finding plain text better at its job than word processors are at theirs, I learnt at my first tech job that plain text could be managed like code. This appealed to me. I also found that plain text, as long as it is structured in some predictable way, could be styled in any way I wanted, using simple custom scripts or other applications. And even after styling, I’d still have the plain text source. It was the best of all possible worlds. If that wasn’t enough, I also have a few blind friends who probably couldn’t use computers if it weren’t for plain text: screen readers (a kind of software) can’t see binary objects, so the computer just reads out the plain text strings associated with objects, which allows a blind user to navigate an interface without seeing it.

What do you use plain text for? Basically everything, honestly. When I write, I write in Docbook, an XML schema (it’s like HTML, but with more tags to remember). With my sources saved as XML, I’m able to apply custom XSL (think of it as the CSS of the XML world) styles and export to EPUB (the HTML-based open source ebook format) or to HTML or even to something screwy like .docx or PDF. I script this process with GNU Make. When I draw something, I frequently use Inkscape, which saves to SVG. SVG is actually an XML schema, so even my graphic work technically ends up as plain text. When I make music, I use Qtractor and a bunch of plugins. When I stop for the day, I use aj-snapshot to take a plain text snapshot of my session so I can quickly resume work later. Of course, programming, whether it’s Python or Lua or C++ or Java, happens in plain text. And HTML and CSS and Javascript and PHP. It’s all just text. And I use Linux exclusively, so all of my user preferences and many of my daily tools are written in plain text, so I can edit them from anywhere with or without special applications or even Linux itself. There are some things I do on a computer that don’t involve plain text, but I’d say it was less common than the things that do.

What keeps you using plain text? Flexibility and parseability. Plain text isn’t married to a specific set of tools, much less to a specific platform. You can always turn it into something more exciting after the fact, but your source should be plain text. It’s the vulgate of computers. It’s simple, and it’s harder for something simple to fail the way over-engineered, needlessly complex systems do. In addition to that, text can parsed with lots of amazing tools. If you’re a geek, you can do amazing things with a few clever grep and sed commands. If you’re not interested in juggling text that way, then there are tools like pandoc, DocBook, and Sphinx, and AsciiDoc that make it easy to reliably produce amazing documents.

Do you use any markup or formatting languages? If so, which ones and why? I use Docbook because it’s explicit. Docbook was the first markup language I learned, because the Slackbook was written in Docbook and I wanted to build the latest version of it from its source code. Next thing I knew, I was using it on a daily basis for my own work, and then I got hired at a company to work in Docbook all day, and eventually it just became second nature. I did try others but I prefer Docbook because it lets me be specific about the structure and semantics of my text. For me, tagless structured text fails at making markup natural. Every time I use Markdown, I have to resort to HTML to get around infuriatingly silent parser failures, and when I use others like Sphinx or Asciidoc, I end up having to find work-arounds to achieve the style I want. When I work in Docbook, I’m able to tag text for what it is, and then apply styles according to those tags when I’m ready to style. That said, Docbook is cumbersome for some things, so I do use CommonMark, not necessarily because I like it, but because it’s a popular form for structured text, and that’s certainly better than unstructured text, or having 100 different structures. And CommonMark does fix many of the problems in pure Markdown.

What are your favourite plain text tools or applications? I use GNU Emacs for almost all text, whether I’m writing an article or a book or a config file or software. Like most Emacs users, I have an extensive .emacs file, so my version of Emacs is uniquely customised for how I work. That’s the advantage of using an editor that is also its own interpreter. I use nxml-mode when I write in Docbook, and I highly recommend that for anyone looking into Docbook. This mode lets Emacs catch a lot of XML errors that you wouldn’t otherwise find out about until processing time. For processing my XML into pretty deliverables, I mostly use xmlto, xsltproc, and fop. Xmlto is a script that converts XML to common formats like HTML, which I bundle up as an EPUB using Linux’s zip utility. For PDFs, xsltproc applies XSL styles and then fop (from the Apache Foundation) transforms it to PDF. When I’m too busy or too lazy to bother styling my own XML, I use pandoc, which converts nearly anything to nearly anything else. It’s a big tool, but one that no plain text user should be without.

Is there one tool that you can’t do without? Linux, and Git. In that order. Linux allows me to manage my systems sanely, with a heavy emphasis on plain text. Git allows me to version control everything I do in plain text.

Is there anything you can’t do with plain text? Personally, I can’t think of anything. I’ve heard that plain text isn’t great for huge data sets, because you end up just scrubbing every single string for a match. For instance, you can encode graphics using plain text, but you just wouldn’t do it. That’s why applications, like The GIMP, use binary file formats. You wouldn’t want to wait for a 4k photograph to be parsed from its plain text description.

Eight Questions For Brian Bennett | 24 April 2017 by: Scott Nesbitt Welcome to the first edition of Eight Questions For …, where I pick the brains of plain text enthusiasts from around the world and around the web. I’m kicking the series off with a chat with Brian Bennett, a teacher from Indiana. Brian was one of the of first people to agree to be interviewed for this series, and the first one to send me his answers. What I found interesting about Brian’s shift to plain text was that it started off being pragmatic. Plain text then became a digital lifestyle and work style choice for him. Brian gets bonus points for using the Atom text editor and Todo.txt (two of my favourite tools). Let’s hear from Brian:

When did you start using plain text? I started programming in 2012 while I was working at a software company as an education liaison. Since then, I’ve started using it for personal tasks like todo lists and idea parking lots. Many of my text files are tied to Python or bash scripts.

Why did you start using plain text? I wanted to know more about how the software engineers worked so I could work more efficiently with them. I like the flexibility (you can use text files on literally any platform) and the tiny size of the files.

What do you use plain text for? Task management (using Todo.txt at the command line) and idea vaults (which are Python scripts tied to a bash alias). I also program systems to make my work more efficient (document creation and distribution in Google Apps Script, logging work hours, etc).

What keeps you using plain text? I can start a file on my phone, put it in my Dropbox, then open it on my iPad to add some stuff before finishing details on my computer when I can sit down. The format is infinitely transferrable and lasts forever, as long as I can find the file. I’m also not distracted by thinking about formatting because I’ve learned that I’m easily focused on how it looks above the substance. Plain text helps me focus on communicating an idea clearly in print before looking at its aesthetics.

Do you use any markup or formatting languages? If so, which ones and why? I learned plain HTML before Markdown, so I frequently find myself writing in HTML notation. Markdown is becoming more habitual, but I don’t have any Markdown formatters outside of my personal blog, so it really only applies there.

What are your favourite plain text tools or applications? I use Atom editor on my Mac nearly exclusively. Every now and then I’ll make a file and add some info at the command line, but not often. I haven’t found a specific editor on mobile that I love yet.

Is there one tool that you can’t do without? Dropbox syncs all of my files for my todo list, in particular. As long as I can read and write to it, I’m happy. I’ve also used GitHub to store files across devices, but that’s usually for larger projects rather than single documents.

Is there anything you can’t do with plain text? I work on a distributed team, so we rely heavily on Google Drive and related apps. I can throw plain text files up there, but my day to day work with others still lives in word processors. Version tracking is also hard to do with a straight plain text file, so other applications to take care of versioning are helpful.

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 reaping the benefits of text files.