You might be using programs like Adobe Illustrator/ InDesign, sodipodi or CorelDRAW. If you spend time making Documents for presentation you'll know that Word processors are limited in this area. Your formatting may not be represented correctly, but at least your content is there for posterity. ( Tutorial on changing the default format in Microsoft Word) If you choose not to do this because RTF does not support some feature you need, you should still consider using RTF as you archival format. You should be able to make this your default format so all future documents are in the RTF format. While work proceeds on the OpenDocument standard (Version 1.0 was approved as an OASIS standard in May 2005), RTF (Rich Text Format) is the most widely supported and documented format available. Whichever word processor you use, it should support several formats, choosing the most durable format is very important. doc format is now well supported by several editors. People have had different levels of success when they've chosen to migrate from one document editor to another, as each used its own format. For a long time there has been no open standard for documents, so compatibility has been a constant problem. Applications for this type of text are found in popular office suites like Microsoft Office, AppleWorks and .įor the purpose of durability of your documents it is important that the document you write today will still be readable next year. Letters to friends and colleagues, project lists and so on. Most of the time you probably use it for writing basic text documents.
WHATS RICH TEXT FORMAT FREE
Text documents are what you produce most of the time on one of the many commercial or free word processors. In a pinch it is often possible to use notepad and similar editors to get the raw text out of other types of files, and it can be informative to try this on other files you plan to store.
WHATS RICH TEXT FORMAT CODE
Current versions of notepad assume UTF-8 if the file is completely valid UTF-8 or has a UTF-8 byte order mark, UTF-16 if they detect a UTF-16 byte order mark and the windows ANSI code page (1252 for western versions) otherwise.
If you are really paranoid you may also want to find and store the authoritative tables for converting that encoding to unicode (try and ).įor Windows users, Notepad is the default application for handling TXT files. So it is a good idea to try and find out what encoding you are using and record it. txt suffix, but it can be hard to determine which one automatically. Text files using an encoding based on ASCII are usually represented with the. UTF-8, which can represent texts of all languages in real use, is becoming more common and may be the best choice for long term storage of text. Other parts of the world will have other conventions. In the western world windows-1252 (which is closely related to ISO-8859-1) is the most common of these. There are a variety of other encodings based on ASCII which add support for more characters.
There is no embedding of any images or colors, and there is no support for diacritic marks or non-Latin scripts. The only formatting available is the selection of line breaks. It has been developed since 1963 and must be the single most supported format ever. Text documents - you can choose fonts, colors, text size, backgrounds and imbed images (sounds/video etc.).ĭocuments for presentation - all the options of Text documents, with restrictions on further editing.įor Plain text files the simplest, and most durable format is ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). Plain text files - simple text, no formatting, no font choices. Depending on what the document contains there are several types of format to choose from. In most types of organisations text documents are their most important type of electronic information after financial accounts.