<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Hi Zdenek, all,<div><br></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>I was to lazy to list all those encodings.</div><div><br></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>I will be more precise know for those not reading carefully.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>There is a difference between what is considered plain text in the computer</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>world and what its content is.</div><div><br></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Basically, plain text is just that text no matter what its content is. That is in the</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>computer world you can have PLAIN TEXT FILES and have content that is</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>TeX, et all, HTML, XML, SGML and for most programming languages.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>That is the source for these languages are in a more or less human readable format</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>--- TEXT.</div><div><br></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Whether, the due to the syntax of the language represented a character can be used</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>directly or an "Escape" character to represent them is irrelevant. Naturally, you have to</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>know the syntax to understand the text. Still it is plain text according to the standards that</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>define the content of the files.</div><div><br></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>As I said I guess Unicode should be considered as plain text. Yet, unicode is special</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>in the same way as ASCII and Extended ASCII, 7-bit ASCII and 8-bit ASCII depending</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>on the fonts you used you got different results when output on the screen or printer.</div><div><br></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The problem there are not any fonts that implement the FULL unicode set. What is what is needed.</div><div><br></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>On the other side, until we have OSes that truly fully support unicode, unicode can be truly considered to be </div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>plain text. </div><div><br></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>As far a TeX is concerned it was not designed to handle unicode or even 8-bit. It has been though fragmented to</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>handle them. It has come at a cost. It would be time to redesign it. refractor if you will.</div><div><br></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>regards</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Keith.</div><div> <br><div><div>Am 14.11.2011 um 11:07 schrieb Zdenek Wagner:</div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div>It's not the encoding that determines whether it is a plain text.<br>Texts in ISO 8859-1, CP852, UTF-8, UTF-16, BIG-5 can be plain texts.<br>LTR/RTL is no problem in modern editors, I can easily combine<br>Czech/English/Hindi/Urdu (uses arabic script) in a single document,<br>the languages/scripts may even be mixed within a paragraph. What<br>determines whether it is or is not a plain text is the presence or<br>absence of control characters or commands no matter whether the file<br>can be viewed and/or edited in a plain text editor such as vim or<br>notepad. If I type < I wish it to mean "less that" but in XML it marks<br>the element tag, If I need such a character in XML or SGML, I have to<br>write < no matter what editor I use. If it were plain text, <<br>would mean ampersand followed by the letters lt and a semicolon. If I<br>type & in a plain text, it means "and". If I type it in a TeX file, it<br>is a special character for \halign (unless \catcode is changed), in<br>XML and SGML it means that all following characters up to the first<br>semicolon is an entity name. If I have to insert an ampersand, I have<br>to write \& in TeX or & in XML and SGML. There are different<br>methods how to enter A, eg ^^41 in TeX or A in XML and SGML. As<br>Phil wrote, there is a clearly defined MIME type for a plain text.<br><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#007521"><br></font></div></blockquote></div><br></div></body></html>