Back to the text file?

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Dec 8, 2006 at 09:29 PM

Derek,

There are a great many advantages to plain text, many of which you’ve mentioned in your commentary. Here’s another advantage:

I sometimes have to pretend to be a graphic designer. When I do, I always convert any Word documents or RTF documents to plain text before importing into my desktop publishing program—this way you don’t get any annoying formatting code gumming up the works. I do the same when importing text into Front Page when creating a web site.

When composing my own text, I often work in a plain text editor—Note Tab. It’s nimble, quick and clean, and that makes it easy to redraft sentences on the fly—something I find myself doing, even in so-called “first drafts.”

I’d guess that 90 percent of the information I collect and manage is perfectly fine in plain text. I’m one of those eagerly awaiting the version of Zoot which will handle formatted text, but I hope Tom Davis also provides the option to capture and store information as plain text.

Steve Z.