======================= Why Prefer Textfiles? ======================= by Jakash3 January 21, 2010 Textfiles are a universal way to share knowledge and document anything that an intelligent entity wishes to express, which can be saved and viewable for generations. Textfiles are files that contain human readable characters in the ASCII encoding (Unicode is rising and replacing this). The ASCII characters are characters 32 to 126 (decimal). The font of textfiles is usually Courier New, Lucida Console, Terminal, or System fonts; these fonts are chosen because of widespread availability on most systems, including the old ones. It has to be a font that everyone has and read. It is also traditional as this font(s) has stuck with textfiles and text editors for decades. For generations in the computer world, many users have written, read, and distributed textfiles. The content of textfiles varies greatly; you can write about anything you want. Some examples include (in abc order): Adventures, Anarchy, Art, BBS, Computers, Conspiricies, Drugs, Food, Games, Hacking, Humor, Internet, Law, Mass Media, Music, News, Occult, Phreaking, Piracy, Politics, Programming, School, Role Playing, Science, Sex, UFO’s, and Viruses. Another advantage to textfiles is that it does not take any special software to read textfiles. In fact you can read textfiles through a system command line. And textfiles open up rather quickly with the simplest text editor instead of using some bulky, ram-eating word processor (that applies unfavored defaults such as automatically formatting the text read from a file, thus ruining the character count and ascii art that may be found in that text file) to load every time you open a textfile. One of the biggest advantages is that text files take up less space on a disk and in the real world too! In the real world, many people are still in the old tradition of using paper, ink, lead (pencils), paper clips, pencil sharpeners, erasers, white out, printers, and other office equipment. This waste of resources is no longer needed since we have computers which can hold thousands of times more text and memory than what we can store (and the time it take to write it) it on paper and other physical things that take up space and waste natural resources. So why do we still do it? My main point is that textfiles are simple, fast, and accessible to everyone which is the best way to spread text based information when it comes to storing them as files. If you don’t have a text editor, then do one of the following: A) Download a text editor B) Read the text editor through a command shell C) Make a text editing program D) Do nothing A great place to find textfiles are at: http://textfiles.com/directory.html