PLAIN TEXT WORKFLOW INSTALL
PLAIN TEXT WORKFLOW CODE
PLAIN TEXT WORKFLOW FREE

PLAIN TEXT WORKFLOW FREE

In order to be shareable between different apps and platforms, the text itself needs to be free of the shackles of app, platform or device.

PLAIN TEXT WORKFLOW INSTALL

The notion that you need to install a certain version of an app on a certain version of an operating system to open a file sounds like a joke. In today’s multichannel text environment a Rich Text file format creates even more barriers than in simpler times. My grandchildren will be able to read a text file I create today, long after anybody can remember what the heck a. That’s just one of the reasons I prefer to work in Plain Text: It’s timeless. Or 30.Īlthough modern word processing programs can do some amazing things-adding charts, tables, and images, applying sophisticated formatting-there’s one thing they can’t do: Guarantee that the words I write today will be readable ten years from now. As a regular person writing text in 2016, using different apps, devices, platforms and formats, you do not. Of course, as a bizdev person you love the golden manacles of custom formats. Maybe the text is in a folder that pretends to be a file, or hidden somewhere “safe from the user”, buried deep in nested folders of spaghetti code, or encrypted in the Fort Knox of a secret database. Rich Text will not allow you to touch the source of your document. Managing these versions quickly becomes a nightmare. Feedback or alternate edits can’t be easily incorporated back into a master file.

ForkingĮxporting may be “just a click”, but forking your text into multiple versions complicates your workflow. And just forget about going back and forth between a CMS and a Word document. You can’t reliably add RTF or Docx text into your CMS. docx, different apps interpret these formats differently. rtf is fairly established and most Word Processors read. With formatted text we never know what we’re going to get when we paste. We copy a simple paragraph from a PDF, then on pasting it into our email the English text morphs into an Italian spaghetti Western, with lots of dramatic spaces and line breaks. The predominant challenge of custom formats in a multichannel publishing environment is that they break Copy-Paste. How do you get out of a list or remove indentation? How do you unlink a word? What about getting rid of that bold formatting, line height, or title size? And how the heck do you place two pictures next to each other? Sometimes it’s not even clear if we are dealing with a bug or bad UX. Here is what you really get when you work with these formats in 2016: Bugs and UX Trouble

PLAIN TEXT WORKFLOW CODE

The main issue of custom formats is that the relation between the source code and text-between what we see and what we don’t see-is capricious. If you are courageous enough to look inside the resulting folder, you may start wondering whether you typed “Hello World” or “Hello Hell”:Ĭustom formats are heavier than plain text formats.

You can see this hidden world by creating a Pages or Word document, typing “Hello World” and saving, then changing the extension to. What we see may please us, but below the surface our word processor secretly builds a more complex text in code. We can use bold, italics, different fonts and formatting, and we see them right there on our screen! When introduced this was a revolution compared to clunky “Reveal codes”-based formatting, or no formatting at all. rtf is famous for its promise of WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get). So what are the strengths and shortcomings of Rich Text, Plain Text and Markdown 1 in this diverse writing landscape? 1. Plain text does better, but lacks Rich Text’s formatting. Stubborn proprietary file formats fail in this frantic new environment. Today, it is written and edited on multiple devices and apps, then mailed, printed, copied, pasted, annotated, published, RSSed, shared and re-shared, using all kinds of tools and platforms. In the classic era of word processing, text was born between MS Word and a printer.

Plain text workflow