Author: Ken Dibble
Posted: 2015-07-18 at 19:29:55
And below is how my email client rendered your response. :)
I didn't post a plain text file because my go-to
for simple word processing tasks is WordPad. (I
don't like Notepad because it doesn't persist any
of my preferences. Wordpad by default supplies
margins. Wordpad can't persist tab settings
properly. Nothing is perfect under the sun.) But
I use Wordpad for all kinds of things, including
formatted documents, and I save the results as
.rtf as a matter of habit to preserve the formatting.
Yes, I understand the need for double-byte
encodings to handle alphabets other than that used in the USA.
But you know, sometimes I wish we were all in the
airline industry. In the airline industry, all
the pilots and controllers are required to speak
English to conduct business, no matter what city
they're in, no matter what their native language is. And they do it.
I picked the wrong business to get involved in. I
don't like change. I am a living example of one
of Alvin Toffler's enclave-inhabiting people,
seeking a slower, isolated setting in which to take shelter from rapid change.
I tell you what: I really need a vacation. I am
taking one in August. That is not soon enough.
Ken
>On Fri, Jul 17, 2015 at 2:31 PM, Ken Dibble
><krdibble@stny.rr.com> wrote: > > For some
>definition of "fine" and some definition of
>"plain text". > > All email is encoded in some
>fashion. > > If you use a device or a service
>that inserts UTF-8 or some other > double-byte
>encoding, or HTML-like punctuation escape codes,
>into the email, > then you don't get "plain
>text" when you try to read the message. And >
>complaints about this get the response, "You
>should use a modern email > program", while
>suggestions that the sender should use a >
>plain-text-compliant email program are chuckled
>over and deemed "quaint", or > perhaps some
>other less amusing term. You're talking to the
>guy who coined "SMTP Good, MAPI Bad" meme. I
>like plain text email. Pretty email is useful
>for marketing and advertisers, less so for
>technical and person-to-person communications.
>Well, we are getting far afield from the point
>of discussion, but I'll take the bait about what
>"plain text" means :) ASCII, the American
>Standard Code for Information Interchange, is
>neither American (unless you think American
>Telephone & Telegraph rather than the US of A),
>based on telegraphy, going back to Baudot code,
>neither a Standard (it was a proprietary
>replacement for EBCDIC, trying to thwart IBM,
>which some might argue is "plain text" ) The
>Windows equivalent, ANSI, was not at the time
>actually an American National Standards
>Institute standard, though it is now, with all
>the horrors of character sets, sorting rules and
>code pages. Everybody had their own "Extended
>ASCII" as the base 128 characters were defined
>and the second 128 were proprietary to each
>extension (WANG ASCII had cooler characters. I
>build an excellent version of Star Trek on in,
>in WANG BASIC.) Microsoft "solved" the problem
>of 8-bit ANSI with MBCS Mult-Byte Character
>Sets, which was decanting a can of worms into a
>bigger and more complicated can. Genius!
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII If I was
>feeling sporting, I'd argue that Unicode is
>plain text. It is a standard (or set of
>standards) and text can be read and interchanged
>on Windows, DOS, Macs, Linuxes, big- and
>little-endian, ARM processors, phones, tablets
>and pretty much all "modern" devices. It has
>well-documented flags for encoding and IS an
>open standard:
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode It is
>"plain" in the sense that it doesn't include
>underlines or colors or blinking or italics, but
>it does make it easy to say â, , â --
>that's Fahrrenheit, Euro or Centigrade, in case
>your email client can't read them :) Or
>ãããã¡ãã (OjÄ«chan) Grandpa -- Ed's
>new name! But others would argue that (as
>Wikipedia distinguishes) RTF is a document
>format while Unicode/ASCII/ANSI are character
>encodings. That's likely true I was surprised
>you didn't just post a TXT file. > I am
>surprised to learn that RTF is a Microsoft
>proprietary format. It is an > "open" format,
>and that's probably what confused me.
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Text_Format
>Microsoft? Yes. Open: No. > My encryption system
>can generate results that contain "unprintable"
>(in the > technical sense, not referring to the
>kinds of words I sometimes use in > response to
>relentless and mindless technological churn)
>characters that > reside at the low end of the
>ASCII table. We often call these "binary" even
>though that is utter nonsense. In a computer,
>it's all binary. > .doc file. I did find that I
>can parse them correctly out of an RTF file >
>FILETOSTR-ed, and my parsing code handles a
>couple of different RTF > "standards", so that's
>what I use for that. > > The RTF I posted to my
>website was created using the version of WordPad
>that > comes with Win XP. > > I don't know
>anyone who can't still pretty easily read an RTF
>file, > including people using OpenOffice on a
>Linux box. Unlike PDF, it is > accessible to
>blind people using screen readers. (No,
>Adobe's > "accessibility" features don't always
>work, and most people don't know how > to
>correctly OCR text being scanned into a PDF, and
>they get actively > irritated when asked to
>learn). To my mind, therefore, RTF is a better >
>universal standard for formatted text than PDF,
>and certainly far better > than .doc (which most
>people don't know how, or can't be bothered
>(see > "irritated", above), to generate from
>their .docx-default versions of > Office). Good
>observations. > However I do see that the RTF
>generated by FRX2Any is readable in Word 2010 >
>but not in the Wordpad that comes with Windows
>7. Well, you will be shocked to discover that
>Windows appears to have abandoned the RTF
>"standard" (last updated in 2008) so perhaps
>they've brought it back in-house for new and
>improved versions. The people who brought us
>"Embrace, Enhance, Extend and Extinguish" --
>what could go wrong? 7-bit ASCII worked fine for
>me on CompuServe at $22.95 a month dialup. These
>kids with their new-fangled line-and-box
>characters,bah! And get off my lawn! > I knew a
>highly-skilled and experienced computer
>programmer who lived > full-time in a cabin
>whose only electricity was supplied by a single
>light > socket dangling from his bedroom
>ceiling. There's something to a simple
>lifestyle, although that's a bit too ascetic and
>spartan for me. -- Ted Roche Ted Roche &
>Associates, LLC http://www.tedroche.com
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