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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.
367:, or even the simplest tables. This leads to endless practical problems: for example, if the computer cannot reliably distinguish footnotes, it cannot find a phrase that a footnote interrupts.
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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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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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363:with footnotes, commentary, critical apparatus,
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528:Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography
207:began developing an electronic edition of
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289:Learn how and when to remove this message
120:Learn how and when to remove this message
27:Any document that is read in digital form
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494:: 933–947.
172:open source
156:photographs
538:Categories
440:References
341:heuristics
310:plain text
279:April 2015
263:improve it
229:hyperlinks
184:formatting
168:plain text
138:electronic
80:newspapers
554:Documents
404:Text file
332:footnotes
267:verifying
213:hypertext
182:or other
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398:See also
353:Metadata
148:document
69:"E-text"
303:vanilla
261:Please
217:Augment
209:Aquinas
135:(from "
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