And below is how my email client rendered your response. :)
I didn't post a plain text file because my go-to
for simple word processing tasks is WordPad. (I
don't like Notepad because it doesn't persist any
of my preferences. Wordpad by default supplies
margins. Wordpad can't persist tab settings
properly. Nothing is perfect under the sun.) But
I use Wordpad for all kinds of things, including
formatted documents, and I save the results as
.rtf as a matter of habit to preserve the formatting.
Yes, I understand the need for double-byte
encodings to handle alphabets other than that used in the USA.
But you know, sometimes I wish we were all in the
airline industry. In the airline industry, all
the pilots and controllers are required to speak
English to conduct business, no matter what city
they're in, no matter what their native language is. And they do it.
I picked the wrong business to get involved in. I
don't like change. I am a living example of one
of Alvin Toffler's enclave-inhabiting people,
seeking a slower, isolated setting in which to take shelter from rapid change.
I tell you what: I really need a vacation. I am
taking one in August. That is not soon enough.
Ken
On Fri, Jul 17, 2015 at 2:31 PM, Ken Dibble
<krdib...@stny.rr.com> wrote: > > For some
definition of "fine" and some definition of
"plain text". > > All email is encoded in some
fashion. > > If you use a device or a service
that inserts UTF-8 or some other > double-byte
encoding, or HTML-like punctuation escape codes,
into the email, > then you don't get "plain
text" when you try to read the message. And >
complaints about this get the response, "You
should use a modern email > program", while
suggestions that the sender should use a >
plain-text-compliant email program are chuckled
over and deemed "quaint", or > perhaps some
other less amusing term. You're talking to the
guy who coined "SMTP Good, MAPI Bad" meme. I
like plain text email. Pretty email is useful
for marketing and advertisers, less so for
technical and person-to-person communications.
Well, we are getting far afield from the point
of discussion, but I'll take the bait about what
"plain text" means :) ASCII, the American
Standard Code for Information Interchange, is
neither American (unless you think American
Telephone & Telegraph rather than the US of A),
based on telegraphy, going back to Baudot code,
neither a Standard (it was a proprietary
replacement for EBCDIC, trying to thwart IBM,
which some might argue is "plain text" ) The
Windows equivalent, ANSI, was not at the time
actually an American National Standards
Institute standard, though it is now, with all
the horrors of character sets, sorting rules and
code pages. Everybody had their own "Extended
ASCII" as the base 128 characters were defined
and the second 128 were proprietary to each
extension (WANG ASCII had cooler characters. I
build an excellent version of Star Trek on in,
in WANG BASIC.) Microsoft "solved" the problem
of 8-bit ANSI with MBCS Mult-Byte Character
Sets, which was decanting a can of worms into a
bigger and more complicated can. Genius!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII If I was
feeling sporting, I'd argue that Unicode is
plain text. It is a standard (or set of
standards) and text can be read and interchanged
on Windows, DOS, Macs, Linuxes, big- and
little-endian, ARM processors, phones, tablets
and pretty much all "modern" devices. It has
well-documented flags for encoding and IS an
open standard:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode It is
"plain" in the sense that it doesn't include
underlines or colors or blinking or italics, but
it does make it easy to say â, , â --
that's Fahrrenheit, Euro or Centigrade, in case
your email client can't read them :) Or
ãããã¡ãã (OjÄ«chan) Grandpa -- Ed's
new name! But others would argue that (as
Wikipedia distinguishes) RTF is a document
format while Unicode/ASCII/ANSI are character
encodings. That's likely true I was surprised
you didn't just post a TXT file. > I am
surprised to learn that RTF is a Microsoft
proprietary format. It is an > "open" format,
and that's probably what confused me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Text_Format
Microsoft? Yes. Open: No. > My encryption system
can generate results that contain "unprintable"
(in the > technical sense, not referring to the
kinds of words I sometimes use in > response to
relentless and mindless technological churn)
characters that > reside at the low end of the
ASCII table. We often call these "binary" even
though that is utter nonsense. In a computer,
it's all binary. > .doc file. I did find that I
can parse them correctly out of an RTF file >
FILETOSTR-ed, and my parsing code handles a
couple of different RTF > "standards", so that's
what I use for that. > > The RTF I posted to my
website was created using the version of WordPad
that > comes with Win XP. > > I don't know
anyone who can't still pretty easily read an RTF
file, > including people using OpenOffice on a
Linux box. Unlike PDF, it is > accessible to
blind people using screen readers. (No,
Adobe's > "accessibility" features don't always
work, and most people don't know how > to
correctly OCR text being scanned into a PDF, and
they get actively > irritated when asked to
learn). To my mind, therefore, RTF is a better >
universal standard for formatted text than PDF,
and certainly far better > than .doc (which most
people don't know how, or can't be bothered
(see > "irritated", above), to generate from
their .docx-default versions of > Office). Good
observations. > However I do see that the RTF
generated by FRX2Any is readable in Word 2010 >
but not in the Wordpad that comes with Windows
7. Well, you will be shocked to discover that
Windows appears to have abandoned the RTF
"standard" (last updated in 2008) so perhaps
they've brought it back in-house for new and
improved versions. The people who brought us
"Embrace, Enhance, Extend and Extinguish" --
what could go wrong? 7-bit ASCII worked fine for
me on CompuServe at $22.95 a month dialup. These
kids with their new-fangled line-and-box
characters,bah! And get off my lawn! > I knew a
highly-skilled and experienced computer
programmer who lived > full-time in a cabin
whose only electricity was supplied by a single
light > socket dangling from his bedroom
ceiling. There's something to a simple
lifestyle, although that's a bit too ascetic and
spartan for me. -- Ted Roche Ted Roche &
Associates, LLC http://www.tedroche.com
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