About Plain Text

Plain text is text that isn't formatted. No bold, no italic, no fonts, no tables or diagrams or pictures, no different font sizes. Just a sequence of letters, numbers and punctuation marks, including spaces. Plain text is normally broken into lines using a special invisible new line character. Accented letters and tabs are allowed in plain text.

There are many forms of formatted text, corresponding to different apps or programs that read and write to files. A prominent example is Microsoft Office's Word and its .docx file format (or Excel's .xlsx format). There are many advantages to formatted text, but a disadvantage is that not every computer will have the app or program needed to use it. All computers can process plain text. Some forms of formatted text can include actual computer code, which is dangerous. If you highlight a word and make it bold, you are not using plain text.

FOLKDJ-L is a listserv that started in the 1990s and it requires messages to be plain text. If you send a message with formatted text, at some point it will be auto-converted into plain text. The problem is that you may not like the way the converted message looks. In particular, the line breaks may be lost or misplaced, which makes a mess of your message.

Here are two ways to deal with this problem. Most programs or apps that use formatted text offer the option (usually under Save As) to save a file as plain text, in Windows usually with the .txt file extension. Save your message as plain text and send that. The second way is to use a plain text editor to compose your message in the first place. Windows includes the Notepad program, which does plain text, and the Mac includes the TextEdit program which does plain text when in plain text mode. (If you use Linux, you already know about this stuff!)

If you compose your message right in your email program, don't format it with fonts and tables and photos. Keep it plain.

On Windows, instead of copy/pasting your message into an email, copy/paste it into Notepad and copy/paste that. If you don't like the way it looks, you can edit it while it's in Notepad and then copy/paste that to email. Similarly with TextEdit on the Mac.