Plain Text Format

Plain text is the universal format, the most durable and transportable. If you can communicate in plain text, everything else is a breeze. Need I explain further? Then you’ll never understand. The only question we can really answer is not why but how.

It is not as if you can’t spice things up a bit in plain text. For quite some time certain conventions have been recognized to the point word processors will translate them into formatting. It’s part of the bracketing that comes from more advanced text processing. You sort of toggle the formatting on for the part that needs it, then close it by toggling it off. Thus, most people recognize that an asterisk on either side of a particular word is equivalent to *bold* text. Some blog software will translate that directly as bold.

Things are slightly more confused about the other form of emphasis. There was a time before computers when we would underline things because typewriters couldn’t do italics. But underlining became restricted for use in HTML links rather early in the computer age. While no longer universally true, we have gotten out of the habit of underlining because it’s now easy to do italics in computer text display. So while the old way of emphasizing text was to bracket the words in underscores _like this_, we now use another convention for /italicizing/ by using slashes to mimic the effect. There’s really no reason to continue using the underscore unless you are just a fuddy-duddy.

The human eye cannot scan for too far without losing track. Text should be wrapped ideally around 50-60 characters. However, given the effect of the ragged edge on the right from use of long words and such, we opt for a standard line-length of 72. That’s been the default in electronic data transmission for a very long time, and it’s pretty smart, if only by accident. If you set it to wrap at 72 characters, most people can read English plain text without having to slow down. By that, I mean using 72 as the right margin and inserting “hard returns,” as they are called.

Those who type English with an American influence are in the habit of including the punctuation inside the quotation marks. The old British standard is to include it only when it was literally necessary as part of some quote. The latter is more precise, but people do what they do, and most folks reading it tend to let it pass as a normal variation. Brits are also more likely to use single quotation marks where Americans use the double. The brain is flexible enough to figure it out most of the time. The only point here is that plain text does not include curly-quotes of either type, strictly speaking, so there is no distinction between a single-quote and an apostrophe.

Always use the modern block format. We do not indent the first line of paragraphs in electronic communication, but we insert one blank line between paragraphs. Naturally, this requires a little rethinking on paragraphs, and they need to be shorter. Make a style change; break it up and avoid long paragraphs. On the other hand, the journalistic habit of one sentence per paragraph is just plain silly. Learn to write coherently, please.

Proper formatting with indentation simply requires an intelligent text editor. Otherwise, you’ll have to do it manually, but the proper distance has typically been three spaces. Actual tabs are anathema because the are too wildly variable, since whatever is displaying the text can be quite arbitrary about interpreting it. The old rule for when to use indented quotation is if your quote runs more than four lines of plain text, set it off as a separate paragraph and indent. You’ll just have to let the reader guess whether the quote ends the paragraph or is in the middle of a longer one.

Sometimes you need to add an explanatory note, but of your parenthetical is longer than two lines, it needs another paragraph. There’s nothing wrong with a single asterisk to mark where your long parenthetical note belongs. Place a matching asterisk at the start of the succeeding paragraph and then the first parenthesis. End that paragraph with the other parenthesis. Genuine footnoting is pushing things a bit, but the tradition has been to note outside references immediately below the paragraph in which it appears. There are no “pages” in electronic plain text.

How you communicate footnoting to the reader varies widely. A favorite is to make use of the concept of editorial references in square brackets. If you have more than a couple of editorial notes or footnotes, use consecutive numbers. In the text you can place a number inside square brackets behind the last of the words that require a reference or note. Then in the paragraph immediately below, start with that same number again in square brackets followed by whatever explanation is required but didn’t fit smoothly in the text above. If your reference is longer than a single paragraph of block text, make it an end note. For something pretending to be solid academic material, you should prefer end notes following the same protocol.

Titles and subheadings used to be marked with all manner of stuff, but these days we simply add one extra blank line for the latter. The title should be obvious standing at the top of the document, but you can get away with, say running a line of dashes the same length as the title on the line immediately below it. For an extra stylish presentation, you might want a full line of dashes or equal signs below the heading matter (title, author, date, etc.) before you actually start the text. If you have administrative stuff at the bottom, you could probably do something similar to separate it from the text. Such administrivia should be below any end notes.

These days we save all caps for things in the class of book titles. Also, centering text is a no-no; it confuses the eyes because you cannot guarantee how it will come out on an electronic display.

Hopefully you are using a text editor advanced enough to re-wrap text after editing. Spellcheck on-the-fly is nice, but at least run one sometime before you release it upon the world. For Windows and Unix/Linux, about the best is Cream. It’s a pretty face with familiar keystrokes on top of the legendary Vim editor. You can turn on spellcheck with the read squiggly lines (under “Tools” in the menu). You can set it to 72 characters and learn how to reformat through either the menu or by keystrokes (CTRL+Q). It does a smart indent with block quotes and can even insert those full-line characters I mentioned in fancy formatting (in the “Insert” menu). Take time to experiment with the settings. For example, I don’t like line numbers displaying and I greatly prefer the Terminal Reverse theme (colors on black background) with the Terminus font. It has quick menu options to do things like set text to title case (capitalize first letters), and you can un-wrap as well as re-wrap. Also, Cream is smart enough to display extended character sets from other languages besides English, and can insert them, too — whatever the font used can show.

You can use whatever works for you. There is nothing elitist or demanding here, just suggestions that are known to work for most people. Plain text: Less is more. It’s my favorite.