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: 2707

Posted by sub
2005-02-10 15:48:35

[Steve C.: Equations in plain text are not very pretty.]

True; bad then, most people working seriously with equations would probably use a tool like TeX/LaTeX rather than Word’s equation editor.

The point is that if textual information is what one is dealing with then plain text format is what’s required in most cases. Before Brainstorm I actually wrote most of my draft texts in NoteTab or EditPad.

When plain text is not enough, it is usually because non textual information gets into the game, namely: images, hyperlinks, presentation formatting etc. In those cases, RTF is only a partial solution. Especially regarding hyperlinks, it is worth noting that the whole Wiki concept is built around plain text editing.

There are exceptions of course, mainly tables, where RTF can indeed make a difference; even then, though, I soon reach its limits. Tables, more often than not, usually concern information that had better been kept in a spreadsheet to start with.

As noted by K.Devlin, in our files, we do not actually store information; rather, representations of information. And that makes all the difference.

alx

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