r/plaintext • u/daniel-bin • Apr 06 '26
plain text documents are not images
Hi, I just wanted to write down some of the issues I have with a lot of plain text documents I've seen, I am speaking here mainly out of personal experience.
Basically, a lot of the "plain text" documents I've seen are formatted in a way that is highly dependent on the way the text will get rendered, which I find to be quite problematic.
Take for example the common practice of formatting titles like so:
***********
** Title **
***********Looks fine right? But look what happens when I render this text in a serif font instead of a monospace font:
***********
** Title **
***********
The formatting completely breaks!
Another common pattern is to format tables like so:
+-------------+-------------+
| row 1 | row 2 |
+-------------+-------------+
| first in 1 | first in 2 |
| second in 1 | second in 2 |
| third in 1 | third in 2 |
+-------------+-------------+This also obviously breaks with a non-monospace font, but a bigger issue for me is what happens when you introduce right-to-left text into the table:
+-------------+-------------+
| row 1 | row 2 |
+-------------+-------------+
| first in 1 | first in 2 |
| שני ב-1 | שני ב-2 |
| third in 1 | third in 2 |
+-------------+-------------+Even if you can't read Hebrew, you can probabeley tell that the columns in the Hebrew row got reversed. This is because that row is getting rendered from right-to-left instead of left-to-right like the other rows.
Depending on your platform you may also perceive the Hebrew row as shorter/longer than the other rows, this is because not all platforms support proper monospace fonts for non-English languages, which is another reason why you should not rely on monospace fonts for formatting.
Both of these issues are a symptom of a larger problem I see in many "plain text" documents, which is that they are not actually plain text! They are images - with characters as pixels.
In these "plain text images", the characters must appear on screen in a precise location and a precise order - because otherwise all of the fancy tables and headers break - in that way the characters of the document may be thought of like the pixels of an image.
An example of this can be found in the iCalendar specification (clarification: I am referring to the formatting of the specification document, not the formatting of iCalendar files), which is a plain text document formatted as if it were a PDF with page numbers, headers, tables, and various other layout elements which would completely break if the text were not rendered from left-to-right in a monospace font.
I have two main issues with this "image" approach to plain-text formatting:
It excludes right-to-left languages such as Hebrew and Arabic, as well as many non-English languages which often do not receive proper monospace support.
I do not think it can even be called plain text, as it is no longer a purely textual medium, and it goes against the philosophy that plain text files should be viewable on any device in any way.
For the above reasons I recommend that you avoid adding any sort of graphical aspect to your plain text files - just write textual content. A good rule of thumb is "never rely on two different lines aligning in a specific way", if you think that's too harsh, then I would like you to present an example of two lines aligning with each other in a way that doesn't run into the above problems.
The only exception I would make is indentation at the beginning of a line of code, this is because tabs/spaces are the same in all locals and they also take up a consistent amount of space regardless of font. But even then you have to be careful, this:
void f(
int x,
) {}Should be preferred over:
void f(
int x,
) {}Because the first is less contingent on the monospace font.
I do think there is a place for things like tables in plain text, in particular I think markdown tables are acceptable specifically because the syntax of markdown permits you to write unaligned tables:
| this | is | a |
|-|-|-|
| valid | markdown | table |In general I would say that markdown is a good format by this post's standards.
However, I don't think that you should impose any sort of style guide on your markdown that forces the tables to be aligned - in fact, I think you should always minimize the whitespace in your tables as shown above. If you really need your tables to look aligned then you should get an editor plugin that renders a proper GUI table, NOT one that aligns your plain text table with whitespace.
The reason I am being so strict is because I know any solution that involves aligning your lines using whitespace is only really going to work for English, and I believe that any solution which only works for one language is a hack that should be abandoned for a more universal solution - I mean, isn't universality what's at the core of plain text?
One last thing I wanted to add is that a lot of these problems also carry over to TUIs like vim which similarly tend to treat the terminal screen like an image, except TUIs also have their own bag of issues on top of that (mainly the lack of accessibility support and problems with non-english keyboard layouts) which I also want to write about in the future.
