plain text

Text file with portion of The Human Side of Animals by Royal Dixon, displayed by the command cat in an xterm window In computing, plain text is a loose term for unformatted text or nontextual data represented as text (e.g. file contents) using printable characters (for example letters, digits, symbols, spaces, tabs, line breaks) in a character encoding. In principle, plain text can be in any encoding, but today usually implies UTF-8.

Plain text is different from formatted text, where style information is included; from structured text, where structural parts of the document such as paragraphs, sections, and the like are identified; and from binary files in which some portions must be interpreted as binary objects (encoded integers, real numbers, images, etc.).