Text editors

A Discussion of Plain Text

A text editor produces plain text. So, for example, there are no commands in the text for underlining, bold, italics, ~~or strike-through.~~

There are no graphical bullets.
This is a short "unordered" list.

There are no automatically numbered lists.
They are known as "ordered" lists.

If you want something like a bulleted list or a numbered list, you construct it yourself:

o The letter "o" looks like a bullet.
o If you have a vivid imagination!

1. And these numbers are done by hand.
2. Not by "markup" with tags.

In plain text, every character takes up the same amount of space:

This section is typed in plain text.  The characters are all equal in width
rather than being proportionally spaced.

In Windows, you may use Notepad to produce plain text. Or you may compose your document in a more powerful wordprocessor as long as you remember to save it as ASCII (DOS) text. Saving it as ANSI may also work.

HTML is the opposite of plain text. It is filled with special tags that tell an HTML interpreter how to format the text.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>Sample HTML Document</title>
</head>

<body>
<p>This sample shows what <i>HTML</i> formatting looks like.</p>
<p>It is <b>only a very limited sample.</b></p>
<blockquote>
  <p>This is almost legible! </p>
</blockquote>
</body>
</html>

When you post your RFD to news.announce.newgroups, be sure to do so in plain text. Turn off HTML formatting, please.

Plain text is the universal language of newsgroups. The goal of setting up the RFD in plain text is to make it easy for anyone to read it and understand what it means without having to strip it of extra formatting codes.

Outlook Express Newsgroups Tutorial--shows how to compose in plain text in OE.