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For example, suppose an HTML document is saved as plain text (*.txt). Then all the markup (structure, formatting, superscripts, …) will be lost. Compound documents will frequently lose information on images and other embedded objects. If the text file is converted back to the original format, information will necessarily be missing.
As another example, converting from PDF to an editable word processor format is a tough chore, because PDF records the textual information like engraving on stone, with each character given a fixed position and linebreaks hard-coded, whereas word processor formats accommodate text reflow. PDF does not know of a word space character—the space ...
Text file with portion of The Human Side of Animals by Royal Dixon, displayed by the command cat in an xterm window. In computing, plain text is a loose term for data (e.g. file contents) that represent only characters of readable material but not its graphical representation nor other objects (floating-point numbers, images, etc.).
ISBN represented as EAN-13 bar code showing both human-readable and machine-readable data. In computing, a human-readable medium or human-readable format is any encoding of data or information that can be naturally read by humans, resulting in human-readable data. It is often encoded as ASCII or Unicode text, rather than as binary data.
With the advent of computing, the term plaintext expanded beyond human-readable documents to mean any data, including binary files, in a form that can be viewed or used without requiring a key or other decryption device.
In HTML and XML, a numeric character reference refers to a character by its Universal Character Set/Unicode code point, and uses the format: &#xhhhh;. or &#nnnn; where the x must be lowercase in XML documents, hhhh is the code point in hexadecimal form, and nnnn is the code point in decimal form.
Antiword is a free software reader for proprietary Microsoft Word documents, and is available for most computer platforms. Antiword can convert the documents from Microsoft Word version 2, 6, 7, 97, 2000, 2002 and 2003 to plain text, PostScript, PDF, and XML/DocBook (experimental).
Most word processors can read and write files in plain text format, allowing them to open files saved from text editors. Saving these files from a word processor, however, requires ensuring the file is written in plain text format, and that any text encoding or BOM settings will not obscure the file for its intended use.