Question: What is Text?
We all know what text is, right? It's the characters, words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs that we read. But text comes in many forms and getting text into the right format for our page layout applications is a crucial part of desktop publishing.
Answer: Web Design/HTML Guide Jennifer Kyrnin poses the question "What is Text?" and goes on to tell us that what we frequently refer to as text isn't necessarily the kind of text that the computer can use for creating Web pages. Again, text has to be in the right format for the way it will be used. For desktop publishing, here are some common text formats:
- Plain Text
text with no formatting
- Rich Text Format
portable, cross-platform file format that preserves basic formatting such as bold and italics
- Tab Delimited Files
special plain text format with text arranged in rows and columns, separated by tabs (or other characters)
- Tagged Text
type of coded markup language that describes how to format and display text and sometimes graphics - PostScript
a programming or page description language describing what a page should look like
- Charts & Tables & Graphs
usually platform or program-specific arrangement of text and graphics
- PDF - Portable Document Format
preserves virtually all text, graphics, and layout formating and is highly portable across computer platforms
Body Text
Also known as body copy, body text is the bulk of what we read. It's the novels, magazine articles, newspaper stories, contracts, and Web pages we read day after day. You are reading body copy or body text now. Body text is usually formatted in a certain way and set in specific types of fonts that make it more comfortable to read.
