Editing Formatted text (section)

==See also==
* [[Character encoding]]
* [[Online rich-text editor]]
* [[Prepress]]
* [[Word processor]]
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<!-- All this is pretty much bogus, I think.
I agree. It contains naïve information. Text encoding ≠ Text formatting.

as a [[sequence]] of [[code]]s (from a [[character encoding]]) for the purpose of [[computer storage]] or electronic [[communication]] of that text. While character encodings like [[ASCII]] represent individual [[character (computing)|characters]] of a [[language]], a text encoding has to represent much larger things like [[article]]s and [[book]]s, and must represent not only the characters they contain but the [[structure]] and [[organization]] of the text, and perhaps [[information]] about the text or its [[appearance]]. Common examples are [[HTML]] and [[RTF]] which represent texts in [[natural language]]s, and [[XML]], which can represent many kinds of text not necessarily intended to be human-readable (the contents of a [[database]], for example).

In general there are two basic forms of text encoding that are widely used. One is to use a [[markup language]] which adds markers to the text itself. Markup has the advantage of being easy to represent, but has the disadvantage of being hard to view without an "aware" [[reader application]]. For instance, if an HTML document is opened in a [[text editor]], it is largely readable, but the text is cluttered with codes, and even more so in the case of a table, and there are character references for special characters which may make parts unreadable, at least to those unfamiliar with the format. Another method is to use "[[pointer]]s" into the text, which is left in the original format. This has the advantage of allowing the [[content]] to be easily readable in any [[editor]], although you lose the "[[styling]]". On the downside, editing such a [[document]] in a non-aware application typically leaves the pointers pointing to the wrong [[data]]. Today the majority of text encoding systems appear to use markup, although whether by choice or simply because "everyone else does" is open to question.

Though character encodings like [[ASCII]] and [[Unicode]] are not, strictly speaking, text encodings in their own right, they may serve as very simple text encodings if one wishes only to preserve the English [[content]] of a document and not necessarily its [[formatting]]. By far the most common text encoding now in use is what might informally be called "Plain ASCII", which involves simply encoding a text as a [[stream]] of ASCII characters. The specifics of how this is done vary greatly: for example, the end of a [[text line]] might be encoded as ASCII code 10 ("[[line feed]]" or "new line") as is common practice on [[Unix]] machines, or as ASCII code 13 ("[[carriage return]]") as is common on [[Apple computer|Apple]] machines, or as both (the sequence <13, 10> is used to end lines on [[DOS]] based machines and many others, while the rather rare sequence <10, 13> was used by some [[Acorn Computers Ltd|Acorn]] machines). Some texts also use this line-end sequence inside [[paragraph]]s (with a blank line between paragraphs) while some do not.  Also, various texts in this form interpret code 9 ("tab") and other [[control character]]s differently.  None of these methods specify how to identify text structure like [[heading]]s and [[table]]s, or special text forms like [[italics]]. Text in this format is basically readable by any [[computer]] though some work might be needed to accommodate local variations, and all information besides the actual [[word]]s of the text will be lost.
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