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file, but that it has no information beyond "the text itself"—no representation of bold or italics, paragraph, page, chapter, or footnote boundaries, etc. Michael S. Hart, for example, argued that this "is the only text mode that is easy on both the eyes and the computer". Hart made the correct point
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In consequence of this, such texts cannot be reliably re-formatted. A program cannot reliably tell where footnotes, headers or footers are, or perhaps even paragraphs, so it cannot re-arrange the text, for example to fit a narrower screen, or read it aloud for the visually impaired. Programs might
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might be omitted, or might simply appear as additional lines of text, perhaps with blank lines before and after (or not). An ornate separator line might be represented instead by a line of asterisks (or not). Chapter and sections titles, likewise, are just additional lines of text: they might be
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that proprietary word-processor formats made texts grossly inaccessible; but that is irrelevant to standard, open data formats. The narrow sense of "e-text" is now uncommon, because the notion of "just vanilla ASCII" (attractive at first glance), has turned out to have serious difficulties:
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output usually produces more information than this, such as the use of bold and italic. If this information is not kept, it is expensive and time-consuming to reconstruct it; more sophisticated information such as what edition you have, may not be recoverable at all.
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The narrow sense of e-text as "plain vanilla ASCII" has fallen out of favor. Nevertheless, many such texts are freely available on the Web, perhaps as much because they are easily produced as because of any purported portability advantage. For many years
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relating to the text is sometimes included with an e-text, but there is by this definition no way to say whether or where it is preset. At best, the text of the title page might be included (or not), perhaps with centering imitated by indentation.
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the work. For example, is it the first or the tenth edition? Who prepared it, and what rights do they reserve or grant to others? Is this the raw version straight off a scanner, or has it been proofread and corrected?
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information, or not. An e-text may be an electronic edition of a work originally composed or published in other media, or may be created in electronic form originally. The term is usually synonymous with
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detectable by capitalization if they were all caps in the original (or not). Even to discover what conventions (if any) were used, makes each book a new research or reverse-engineering project.
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or the accented vowels used in many
European languages cannot be represented (unless awkwardly and ambiguously as "~n" "a'"). Asian, Slavic, Greek, and other writing systems are impossible.
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Third, "e-texts" in this narrow sense have no reliable way to distinguish "the text" from other things that occur in a work. For example, page numbers,
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Second, diagrams and pictures cannot be accommodated, and many books have at least some such material; often it is essential to the book.
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Reading and
Writing the Electronic Book. Nicole Yankelovich, Norman Meyrowitz, and Andries van Dam. IEEE Computer 18(10), October 1985.
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In some communities, "e-text" is used much more narrowly, to refer to electronic documents that are, so to speak, "plain
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strongly favored this model of text, but with time, has begun to develop and distribute more capable forms such as
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Fourth, and a perhaps surprisingly important issue, a "plain-text" e-text affords no way to represent information
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Fifth, texts with more complicated information cannot really be handled at all. A bilingual edition, or a
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Coombs, James H.; Renear, Allen H.; DeRose, Steven J. (November 1987).
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If actuality, even "plain text" uses some kind of "markup"—usually
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in the 1940s, while large-scale electronic text editing,
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to guess at the structure, but this can easily fail.
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352:with footnotes, commentary, critical apparatus,
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517:Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography
196:began developing an electronic edition of
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423:L'Association des Bibliophiles Universels
278:Learn how and when to remove this message
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16:Any document that is read in digital form
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41:Please help
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483:: 933–947.
161:open source
145:photographs
527:Categories
429:References
330:heuristics
299:plain text
268:April 2015
252:improve it
218:hyperlinks
173:formatting
157:plain text
127:electronic
69:newspapers
543:Documents
393:Text file
321:footnotes
256:verifying
202:hypertext
171:or other
499:59941802
387:See also
342:Metadata
137:document
58:"E-text"
292:vanilla
250:Please
206:Augment
198:Aquinas
124:(from "
83:scholar
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398:e-book
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169:markup
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210:FRESS
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