Text standards



Acronym

Full Name

Purpose

Description

Reference

RealText

RealText

Real-time text and multimedia delivery over the Internet

RealText format is a mark-up language to format streaming text for playback in RealPlayer. It can be used to create presentations consisting of text alone, or combine text with other media, for example, closed-captioned video.

http://service.real.com/help/library/guides

PDF

Portable Document Format

A file format developed by Adobe Systems for representing two dimensional documents in a device independent and resolution independent format

Each PDF file encapsulates a complete description of a 2D document that includes the text, fonts, images, and 2D vector graphics that compose the document. Importantly, PDF files don't encode information that is specific to the application software, hardware, or operating system used to create or view the document. This feature ensures that a valid PDF will render exactly the same regardless of its origin or destination. PDF is also an open standard in the sense that anyone may create applications that read PDF files without having to pay royalties to Adobe Systems.

http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/pdf/index_reference.html

TXT

Text file

Document containing unformatted text.

This kind of text format is also called a plain text file to differentiate them from other kinds of binary files, which, at the time the distinction was made, were not supposed to have human readable text. The precise definition of the .txt format is not specified, but typically matches the format accepted by the system terminal or simple text editor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.txt

ASCII

American Standard Code for Information Interchange

Character encoding based on the English alphabet.

ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that work with text. Most modern character encodings have a historical basis in ASCII. ASCII was first published as a standard in 1967 and was last updated in 1986.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII

UNICODE

Unicode

Industry standard providing means by which text of all forms and languages can be encoded for use by computers.

Unicode has become the largest and most complete character encoding scheme, serving as the dominant such method in the internationalization and localization of computer software. The standard has been implemented in many recent technologies, including XML, the Java programming language, and modern operating systems.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode

RTF

Rich Text Format

Document file format developed by Microsoft for cross-platform document interchange.

Most word processors are able to read and write RTF documents. Unlike most of the word processing formats, RTF is human-readable.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?
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