What are the advantages and disadvantages of using plain text versus rich text formats?

Plain text: the Spartan warrior of words. Lean, clean, universal. No fancy fonts, just pure information ready to conquer any platform. Code, scripts, documents, data – whatever the battle, plain text charges straight in. Open it anywhere, edit it on anything, share it without fear. The ultimate digital democracy.

Plain text allows you to focus on content and quality, without formatting nuances. We often get stuck thinking about what font, size, colors, height, or weight we want to use on our documents. This decreases your creativity impulse and leads to procrastination. Plain text is the most efficient way to do high-quality writing, planning, documenting, and strategizing.

AI forgot HTML and XML. They want at least 125 characters to post a comment. The first sentence didn't qualify. They want quantity over quality in order to post.

"Lacks visual appeal" sounds like something AI would say. Layout is not important. A person with limited vision using a screen reader does not depend on visual appeal to understand content. Browsers have been able to change the style sheet used to read a web page for decades so that a person with limited vision can change font sizes and contrast. However, content such as heading levels are important for understanding. While different style sheets can change the appearance and layout, those clues are important. In short, an important disadvantage with plain text is accessibility.

Plain text can limit the Organisational branding, that is applied to documentation. As it forces a more linear look and feel to the documentation. In some cases a linear look and feel will be beneficial. Though, the longer the document is this linear look and feed can be more 'tiring' for users to read.

Totally forgot accessibility again. Screen readers use the cues in the formatting to let the reader know paragraph heading levels, what is a link, and navigation on the page. Or, at least it should. This AI article assumes everyone is reading a book or magazine article. You can't assume that is the case anymore.

Rich text formatting allows greater structure and consistent look and feel to be applied to documentation. It makes the document 'easier' and potentially more 'interesting' to read. Utilising, pre-defined styles and document templates will help maintain continuity of rich test formatting within and between documents.

Anyone note how light a Microsoft Word document is, especially when compared to PDF? It is because Word documents are in XML. The Word interface adapts between several types of views. The same goes for any document stored in any type of markup language: HTML, XML, Markup. Word and PDF documents stored on the web are scanned very nicely by Google. Where did the hallucination about being more susceptible to "errors, corruption, or viruses" come from? I've had corrupt text documents, too.

The new file formats used by word processors, etc., minimise the adverse impact of risk text usage, etc. The diversity of file formats that document scan be saved is also a major benefit. So, may of the legacy challenges applied to rich text formatting are less relevant/ impactful, now-a-days.

You aren't going to create a text document for someone to simply read (probably). On the other hand, Microsoft Word, Markup, XML with transforms and style sheets, and HTML with stylesheets are things you're are going the create. The exception are some text files that are really meant for a computer to read that a human may have to glance at.

The nature of the documentation/ material, being produced, should govern whether plain, or rich, text formatting is used. Rich text has a number of benefits over plain text, as indicated above. Particularly if the documentation: - Needs to be branded. - Is long. - Needs to be structured, etc. So, when considering whether to produce plain text, or rich text document. it is important to consider: - Nature of the document. - How the documentation will be referenced. - What type of audience the documentation is for, etc.