Comments on: We Need More .txt

By: Document Formats » Bin-Blog

Document Formats » Bin-Blog — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 18:36:12 +0000

[...] The simplest format there is. If there is something I should remember, I just put it in a text file and save it to the desktop. I used to use it a lot earlier – but I don’t use it much nowadays due to searchability issues. There quite a few advantages in using the text format [...]

By: Brian Rock

Brian Rock — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 15:51:43 +0000

Let’s not forget that .doc isn’t the only (or best) office file format out there. Open Office Writer’s .odt format is automatically compressed on saving, and the resulting file is about half of the equivalent plain text.

That said, I think a move toward XML would be the best direction to go in. It’s easier to work with on the back-end. A lay-person might not be able to read XML source, but that’s where the Word Processor (or browser?) comes in and renders it. As long as it’s a standard data format, people can use whatever app they want to access it.

By: Abhijit Nadgouda

Abhijit Nadgouda — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 04:00:18 +0000

Christian, I would agree with you in a fully automated world. XML files are still not readable for a layman. However, I think the next step from a .txt is .xml, especially towards automation.

By: Montoya

Montoya — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 18:39:21 +0000

I disagree, I would much prefer if there were an XML format and viewer for resumes, and that became the default for sharing them. It would then be *so* easy for software to work with resumes.

By: Pratik

Pratik — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 20:40:13 +0000

I am forced to accept ugly .doc files, because I am a college student. Sadly the truth is a lot people don’t care of technical merits of using .txt files, they only use what is default, and we get stuck dealing with their mistakes.

By: raveman

raveman — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 22:26:44 +0000

text files are dead because we live now in Ajax world. Yes, plain HTML is better and faster, but people want it to look cooler. Word is just plain text file on steroids.

Its funny that someone here said that utf8 should be the standard for text files, but some of you cant agree that .doc is standard for documents.

The only good argument is that text file is smaller, but we all have now uber-connections, so … size doesnt matter.

By: Ben Hoyt

Ben Hoyt — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 19:18:24 +0000

In my experience companies themselves are fine with a website URL or whatever format for your CV/resume, but recruiting firms require Word docs because they fit in with their big icky HR software. I must say I dislike the red tape and overheads introduced by recruiting firms, and believe companies would do well to skip them and hire direct.

By: Nelz

Nelz — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 17:03:28 +0000

I was *totally* flustered when I was applying for jobs, and I sent someone a resume in .txt format… They insisted I send them a .doc format one. Why!?!

It turns out that Microsoft Word actually *can* read and display documents in .txt format.

By: http://lukeplant.me.uk/

http://lukeplant.me.uk/ — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 13:45:56 +0000

Of course, you forgot about encodings. It makes plain text entirely *non* cross platform and non portable. Plain text in emails works fine, as the headers contain encoding information. There is no standard for doing this in plain text, and guessing in unreliable. Attempts at specifying encoding can make things worse e.g. putting unicode BOMs at the beginning of files can cause breakage with some tools. So, when you receive a `plain text’ file, it is basically impossible to parse it at all. http://www.creativepro.com/story/feature/9763.html

It’s possible that this might become less of a problem if UTF8 becomes the defacto standard, but that isn’t going to happen perfectly anytime soon, and until it does plain text will continue to be painful and limited in usefulness.

By: Spacebat

Spacebat — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 12:58:27 +0000

I use outline-mode in emacs a lot, which breaks down to lines starting with N asterisks to indicate hierarchy and I name those files *.otl

At my last job there was a shared drive with a directory for each client, containing among other things a file called network.txt. There had been a few pushes to replace this with a database but the engineers stopped this and insisted they needed to be able to edit the info in vi. However the structureless nature of this file was limited the usefulness of the information. I suggested they use YAML, possibly with a wrapper script to make sure the file saved parsed as valid YAML. That way scripts could iterate over the customers and do the right thing, much of the common information would be in predicable places in the file, and engineers could edit it from remote sites in vi. I found a better job before this was implemented though.