Re: The Glories of Plain Text

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 2704

Posted by zeoli
2005-02-10 07:45:32

There is definitely something to be said for plain text. As someone who frequently uses PageMaker to create brochures and catalogs, I find that one of the first things I do when getting copy from another person is to turn it into plain text, then import it into PageMaker. That way all the junk formatting that inevitably comes with RTF or Word documents is cleansed. This usually saves time, even though I have to go back through and add italics and bold formats where they may already have existed. For this process, I usually use NoteTab Light, although Zoot is good at this as well.

Now that I’ve found a good substitute for InfoSelect (UltraRecall) for storing formatted materials, I find myself less eager for Zoot to become RTF compatible. Some information, however, can be much more valuable when it can be parsed with highlighting (color highlighting or bolding), and as bulleted information.

My hope is that when Zoot is finally ported to 32-bit mode and has RTF formatting, that it can be an option for any individual note. If you look at Jarte, for instance, you will see that you can set any one document to be plain text or rich format, and can set a default mode. This would be very handy in Zoot (or any PIM, for that matter). Also, having the option to export RTF text as plain text, would also be valuable.

So, Stephen, I agree that plain text is not dead… on the contrary, it is a valuable format and programs that now handle it deftly, should not neglect it as they add RTF.

Steve Z.

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