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Plain text is a computing term for unformatted digital text that consists only of characters without any special styling or embedded objects. It is the simplest and most universal way to represent text in a digital format.

Key characteristics of plain text

Unformatted: Plain text contains no formatting information, such as font style, size, color, bolding, or italics. The only structure that exists is basic spacing, tabs, and line breaks.

Highly compatible: Because it lacks complex formatting, plain text is universally compatible and can be opened, read, and edited by virtually any computer, operating system, or text-editing program.

Small file size: The absence of additional formatting data makes plain text files very lightweight, which allows for fast processing and efficient storage and transmission.

Human-readable: Plain text files can be read by both humans and machines without requiring special software. Markup languages like HTML and XML, while structured, are still considered plain text because the markup itself is in a human-readable format.

Encoded: A plain text file uses a character encoding standard, such as ASCII or UTF-8, to map characters to their binary representation. This ensures the text can be interpreted consistently across different systems.