Editing Plain text (section)

{{short description|Term for computer data consisting only of unformatted characters of readable material}}
{{for multi|the cryptography meaning|Plaintext|other uses|Text (disambiguation)}}
{{Refimprove|date=August 2012}}
[[File:Plain_text.png|right|thumb|350x350px|Text file with portion of ''The Human Side of Animals'' by [[Royal Dixon]], displayed by the command <code>[[Cat (Unix)|cat]]</code> in an [[xterm]] window]]
In [[computing]], '''plain text''' is a loose term for data (e.g. file contents) that represent only [[Character (computing)|characters]] of readable material but not its graphical representation nor other objects ([[Floating point numbers|floating-point numbers]], images, etc.). It may also include a limited number of "whitespace" characters that affect simple arrangement of text, such as spaces, line breaks, or tabulation characters. Plain text is different from [[formatted text]], where style information is included; from structured text, where structural parts of the document such as paragraphs, sections, and the like are identified; and from [[binary files]] in which some portions must be interpreted as binary objects (encoded integers, real numbers, images, etc.).

The term is sometimes used quite loosely, to mean files that contain ''only'' "readable" content (or just files with nothing that the speaker does not prefer). For example, that could exclude any indication of fonts or layout (such as markup, markdown, or even tabs); characters such as curly quotes, non-breaking spaces, soft hyphens, em dashes, and/or ligatures; or other things.

In principle, plain text can be in any [[Character encoding|encoding]], but occasionally the term is taken to imply [[ASCII]]. As [[Unicode]]-based encodings such as [[UTF-8]] and [[UTF-16]] become more common, that usage may be shrinking.

Plain text is also sometimes used only to exclude "binary" files: those in which at least some parts of the file cannot be correctly interpreted via the character encoding in effect. For example, a file or [[String (computer science)|string]] consisting of "hello" (in any encoding), following by 4 bytes that express a binary integer that is ''not'' a character, is a binary file. Converting a plain text file to a different character encoding does not change the meaning of the text, as long as the correct character encoding is used. However, converting a binary file to a different format may alter the interpretation of the non-textual data.