Plaintext

From DPCanadaWiki

In general, plain text (sometimes, "plain vanilla" text) refers to a file that contains only alpha-numeric characters, with no formatting markup. Because of plain text's software-independence and universal-accessibility characteristics, PGC requires that all e-books hosted on its site be provided in a plain-text version, no matter what other formats (HTML, PDF, etc.) may also be made available.

While PGC expresses a preference that plain-text e-texts use the ASCII character set, many of the plain-text versions DPC provides to PGC use the Latin-1 character set. In certain situations, PGC does sometimes accept a plain-text version in Unicode or some other character encoding system.

While plain-text e-books contain no formatting markup per se, some formatting conventions using plain-text characters are commonly used. For example, italicized text is usually indicated by wrapping it in _low-line characters_; thought-breaks are usually rendered as a string of asterisks; etc.

(Plain text is often spelled without the space as plaintext at DPC, although in technical contexts, the term plaintext usually refers to the "clear text" content of an encrypted file.)