Hello,

Plain text is Freedom !

Surprising we are still using many formats that lock the user to the use of given software. If you use a specific software for a document, worst would be proprietary closed software, then you will end up in being dependent to this software.

I think that we should promote and try as good a possible plain text, for documents.

TeX or LaTeX is a good example of markup language, which gives the user almost complete freedom.

Any editor such as nano, vim, emacs,... can do the visual thing, or programmed applications can easily read or reformat it.

- Plain text is large ?
You can anytime use gzip.

Do you still use Libreoffice?

It depends on what the document is prepared for and the type of information it contains.

TeX may be fine for preparing documents that are going to be printed, but not everything is. Nor can everyone accept it: none of the articles I've had published were acceptable in TeX markup. Its use is largely confined to scientists and mathematicians, and I recently read an article that showed it was neither faster nor more reliable for maths than a modern word-processor.

Plain text obviously places considerable restrictions on the use of tables and precludes diagrams. Few of the research notes on this computer would be readable or even usable in plain text. Plain text is for programmers, not scholars.

GNU/Linux is peace. Plain text is freedom. Systemd is strength.

Surely ASCII is just another standard imposed on the world by America in its capitalist, imperialist strategy?

Like printing...

Anyone remember when you needed a Postscript printer to be reasonably sure it would work in Linux?

I don't, but I do remember a lot of outdated documentation saying that that was the case.

Courtesy of GNUspeak.

Regards...

Hmmm ....
... but I'm not sure that we really want to go back there.

HTTPS may support your "freedom" but not our "freedom" to read your emails*... not that I'd want to but know the world is far from perfect‽

Sure, try to insert images in a text file. Or even better, try to apply for a job sending a CV in a text file .

You'll inspire me to pull my old bug out of a box

The algorith to decrypt is a hard one.

Ever heard of ascii art? I remember where I worked, we had people who could do you a half-tone portrait of the Queen in ascii.

I have been working on computers since the early 1960s, and some of the machines had disk files dating to the late 1950s. As far as I can tell, the only file format from those days that survives to the present is simple ASCII text. There were (are) end-of-record issues, but you could always throw the files up on a primitive terminal to see what they contained. I occasionally was able to retrieve useful (compilable) code -- invariably, Fortran -- from that ancient stuff.