What is Text ?

Text  is  obviously  the  simplest  of  data  types  and  requires  the  least  amount  of  storage.

Text in the form of words, sentences, and paragraphs is used to communicate thoughts, ideas, and facts in daily life.

Text  may  not  be  as  visually  exciting  as  some  of  the  other  media  types,  but  it  often  conveys  essential  and  precise  information.

Text elements

Alphabet characters

    A – Z and a – z 

Numbers

    0 – 9 

Special characters

    Punctuation (. ,  ; “ ‘ ! : -  /)

    Signs ($ + - = @ # % ^ & *)

Obtaining Text

Text can be captured in following ways:

• Keyboard
• Mouse
• Scanner (OCR) – Optical Character Recognition ((designed to translate images of handwritten or typewritten text (usually captured by a scanner) into machine-editable text ))

Types of Text

Unformatted text (Plaintext)

comprise strings of fixed-sized characters from a limited character set. 

Formatted text (Richtext)

comprise strings of characters of different styles, size and shape together with tables, graphics and image inserted at appropriate point.

Example: Rich Text Format (RTF), HTML, .doc

Hypertext

It enables the integrated set of documents (each comprising formatted text) to be created which have defined linkages between them.