Plain Text, Please!

Nils M Holm, 2007

(Most of) my friends always send me plain text messages. No HTML, no DOC, RTF or PDF. And I really appreciate that. Why? Because

Plain Text is Better

What would you think if you got an email message like this:

 From: Your Good Friend
 To: You
 Subject: Surprise!
 Date: 2007-04-18

 Hello, please see the attachment for my message!

 Attachment 1/1: some document (application/unknown)

Then you open the document and all you see is some obscure, garbled text.

Surprising people with this kind of message seems to be a popular leisure-time pursuit in PC land, unfortunately. To the rest of us, it offers only few options:

ask the sender to re-send their message in a readable format;
ask a friend to open the message for us on their PC;
clutter our harddisk with additional software.

After some fruitless conversations, another possibility emerges:

delete such messages without notice.

Reasons for Using Plain Text

To avoid having to resort to this final option, here are a few good reasons to use plain text in email:

plain text can be read everywhere;
plain text is compact;
properly formatted plain text is beatiful;
plain text can be quoted in replies;
plain text can be processed;
plain text is safe.

Bonus for the creative user:

you can do amazing things with plain text.

Plain text can be read everywhere

There is virtually no platform that cannot process and display plain text. Avoid delays because the recipient cannot open your document. Just send plain text and be sure that your message can be read.

Oh, and please do not ask the recipient to install additional software just because it is "free".

Plain text is compact

Plain text takes up one single byte of disk space per character typed. That is about 1500 bytes (or 0.001 megabytes) per printed page (DIN A4 or Letter). Even a letter of 10 pages would use no more than one hundredth of a megabyte. You can barely stuff "Hello Joe" in an Office file of the same size.

Trivia: The whole Bible in plain text format needs less space than most single-page letters in Office formats (about 0.7 megabytes).

Properly formatted plain text is beatiful

In plain text, you cannot add underlines, boldface characters, or italics. True. But when you read a book, do you really miss all these things? Would you like your favorite novel better, if there were random boldface and italic words? Or would you rather have it in plain text?

And if you really need emphasis in plain text, it is still there.

Plain text can be quoted in replies

 From: You
 To: Your Good Friend
 Subject: Re: Surprise!
 Date: 2007-04-18

 Dear Good Friend,

 On 2007-04-18, Good Friend wrote:
 > Hello, please see the attachment for my message!

 I would love to read your message, but unfortunately
 I can't open your document. Please re-send it as a
 plain text.

Try this with an attached document.

Plain text can be processed

Copy an email address from a plain text message to your address book? No problem. Quote some part of a message in another message? Sure. Search for specific texts in all email messages of a folder? Go right ahead.

And now try to do any of these with messages consisting of attached documents. Good luck!

Plain text is safe

Most malicious programs, like viruses, trojans, etc, spread via attachments that pretend to be documents. Using plain text, what you see is what you get. Unless, of course, you stumble across this rare specimen of a plain text virus:

Hi, I'm a plain-text virus. Please copy me.

You can do amazing things with plain text

Plain text does not have to be boring. Long before the invention of computer graphics, there was an art form known as

    ___   _____ ______________   ___    ____  ______
   /   | / ___// ____/  _/  _/  /   |  / __ \/_  __/
  / /| | \__ \/ /    / / / /   / /| | / /_/ / / /   
 / ___ |___/ / /____/ /_/ /   / ___ |/ _, _/ / /    
/_/  |_/____/\____/___/___/  /_/  |_/_/ |_| /_/
(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_art)

Go ahead, unleash your creative potential using typewriter art! Of course, you have to use a monospace font such as Courier in order to enjoy ASCII Art, but you should do this anyway, or you will miss a lot of fun.

Conclusion

Plain text is safe, efficient, and can be read by every person that has a computer and access to the internet. It can be processed, copied, and shared. In replies you can quote the context that you refer to. Plus: email was invented as a plain text medium.

Is there any good reason not to use it in that way?

Appendix

Why Free Office Software is not Free

Software to handle the complex and bloated documents generated by office programs is everything but "free".

For example, installing Open Office requires the following resources:

Transfer volume	400 megabytes *
Disk space	3700 megabytes *
CPU Time	20h on a Pentium III *
Spare time	hours to days
Other	nerves

*According to the Open Office FAQ.

Of course, you have to repeat the procedure when the Office data format changes. And all this just to read an email message?

Adding Emphasis to Plain Text

There are some widely-understood plain text attributes that resemble text weight, slant, and underline in plain text. Just use them, most people will intuitively grasp them, even if they did not know them before:

Plain text	Office equivalent
`This is _really_ important.`	This is really important.
`This /is/ important.`	This is important.
`This is very important.`	This is very important.
`_/Hooray!/_`	Hooray!
`How do you do this? :-)`	Well?

Email is a mono-spaced medium

Monospace is not "just an ugly font", but it has one undeniable advantage: you can draw with it. Here are some text samples that you will completely miss when you use a proportional (non-typewriter) font:

What it should look like	What a proportional font makes out of it
+---+---+---+ \| X \| \| O \| +---+---+---+ \| \| O \| \| +---+---+---+ \| O \| \| X \| +---+---+---+	+---+---+---+ \| X \| \| O \| +---+---+---+ \| \| O \| \| +---+---+---+ \| O \| \| X \| +---+---+---+
Put emphasis here. ^^^^	Put emphasis here. ^^^^
///// __oOO__(.) (.)__OOo__ (_)	///// __oOO__(.) (.)__OOo__ (_)