Editing Plain text (section)

== Plain text and rich text ==
According to The Unicode Standard:<ref name="uvu14">{{cite web| url = https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode14.0.0/UnicodeStandard-14.0.pdf| title = The Unicode Standard, version 14.0 | pages = 18–19}}</ref>
* "Plain text is a pure sequence of character codes; plain Un-encoded text is therefore a sequence of Unicode character codes.
* In contrast, ''styled text'', also known as ''rich text'', is any text representation containing plain text plus added information such as a language identifier, font size, color, hypertext links, and so on.
* [[SGML]], [[Rich Text Format|RTF]], [[HTML]], [[XML]], and [[TeX]] are examples of rich text fully represented as plain text streams, interspersing plain text data with sequences of characters that represent the additional data structures."

According to other definitions, however, files that contain [[markup language|markup]] or other [[meta-data]] are generally considered plain text, so long as the markup is also in a directly [[human-readable]] form (as in HTML, XML, and so on). Thus, representations such as SGML, RTF, HTML, XML, [[wiki markup]], and TeX, as well as nearly all programming language source code files, are considered plain text. The particular content is irrelevant to whether a file is plain text. For example, an [[Scalable Vector Graphics|SVG]] file can express drawings or even bitmapped graphics, but is still plain text.

The use of plain text rather than binary files enables files to survive much better "in the wild", in part by making them largely immune to computer architecture incompatibilities. For example, with all data encoded as [[UTF-8]] text, all the problems of [[endianness]] can be avoided.