Bit Literacy - Mark Hurst [43]
The two text formats are near-opposites, in fact: ASCII is small, elegant, and compatible with everything; Word is heavy, slow, and proprietary. Much like the DRM-enabled AAC audio format, the Word format is designed with the profit motive in mind. Microsoft is the sole owner of the Word format, so no software application is supposed to read or write the Word format unless Microsoft authorizes it. (Other tools like Google Docs can do so only because their engineers have “reverse-engineered” the format to make their software compatible.) This is in contrast to ASCII, which is a publicly owned, freely available standard that has been in use for decades.
Creating ASCII
Most users create ASCII text, even if they’re not aware of doing so, whenever they write an e-mail. All e-mail programs have the ability to create ASCII text, and many do so by default. (Most PDAs, cell phones, and other text-enabled devices send messages in ASCII, too.)
But creating ASCII doesn’t always mean sending an e-mail. Sometimes users just want to create text—taking meeting notes, for example—to save or share, but not necessarily to print. This calls for a program that is focused on creating and saving text files, not e-mailing them. This is a text editor, an application built specifically to create ASCII text files. There are multiple choices for every platform:
Mac users should use TextWrangler (a program by Bare Bones Software) or the TextEdit program included on most Macs today.
Windows users should use metapad, TextPad, or for more advanced users, UltraEdit. Searching Google on any of the names will bring up the appropriate website.
Linux users already know their favorite text editor.28
Text editors allow the user to create, edit, and save ASCII files, which come with all the advantages of the format. It’s a free, non-proprietary format that works and shares equally well on all platforms. An ASCII file created on a Mac will show the same text on a Windows PC, a BlackBerry, or on any other device.
It’s worth noting that even Microsoft Word can create ASCII text. (To save any Word document as an ASCII file, click “Save As” and then save the document in “Text Only,” or .txt, format.) Thus, in a sense, Word itself is a text editor. But Word’s menagerie of distracting menus, toolbars, popup windows, and print-related features make it harder to use than a text editor like TextWrangler, which was specifically designed for text editing.
Peeking inside a word document
There’s one last comparison to make between ASCII and Word format. The earlier example noted that a Word file is over a hundred times bigger than an ASCII file containing the same text. Any good text editor, like TextWrangler, can show the reason why. Opening the Word file containing the meeting agenda reveals the contents of the file:
A Word file contains a lot of information. And this is the final difference between Word documents and ASCII documents. While ASCII contains only the characters that the user can see on the screen, Microsoft Word documents can contain the text and anything else Microsoft decides to include in the file, without revealing it to the user. Leaving aside all the other disadvantages of Word—the size of the files, the 1980s-era mindset, the expensive succession of upgrades—just the principle here is a problem. It’s not a good idea to use a format that hides information in your files without your knowledge or consent. While Word may be unavoidable in some circumstances, users at least need to be aware of how the format