Formatted text

Formatted text, styled text, or rich text, as opposed to plain text, has styling information beyond the minimum of semantic elements: colours, styles (boldface, italic), sizes, and special features (such as hyperlinks).

Terminology

Formatted text cannot rightly be identified with binary files or be distinct from ASCII text. This is because formatted text is not necessarily binary, it may be text-only, such as HTML, RTF or enriched text files, and it may be ASCII-only. Conversely, a plain text file may be non-ASCII (in an encoding such as Unicode UTF-8). Text-only formatted text is achieved by markup which too is textual, while some editors of formatted text like Microsoft Word save in a binary format.

Beginnings of formatted text

Formatted text has its genesis in the pre-computer use of underscoring to embolden passages in typewritten manuscripts. In the first interactive systems of early computer technology, underscoring was not possible, and users made up for this lack (and the lack of formatting in ASCII) by using certain symbols as substitutes. Emphasis, for example, could be achieved in ASCII in a number of ways: