Plain Text

Plain Text
Plain text is a type of text document that only supports ASCII characters. Because of this, plain text does not support any type of formatting information about the actual text in the document. Compared to rich text, plain text is much more limited. However, the benefit of using plain text is that it requires much less space thanks to its minimalist nature. Another benefit of plain text is that it is compatible with nearly every application on any machine. It is generally inadvisable to transfer and store sensitive data as plain text. Often, plain text will be encrypted, generating ciphertext , so that it is unreadable by humans until it is decrypted and returned to plain text. Rich texts like HTML and XML rely on plain text.