Plain text as you know has no formatting options. You cannot bold/italic/underline anything – but you can use specific characters to represent formatting that are easy to remember. The old-school way of emphasis was to type in all caps. All caps is and has been considered TO BE SHOUTING for years, so you can’t do that anymore unless you want to look...

If you ever have the need to perform simple text encryption to, for example, “hide” text, send secret messages or just fool around, then here are a few resources you may be interested in:Base64 encoder/decoder Text to hexadecimal Text to binaryWhile none of these should be considered secure, they are a very easy way to disguise the target...

NNTR means No Need To Reply. Where this originated from I haven’t a clue, but it’s something that has been dormant for years that I believe needs to be used again. Were I to hazard a guess, I believe NNTR came about due to one of two reasons. Either the fact email used to actually cost something, be it time and/or money, or to discourage useless...

If you ever want to “hide” text in a document so only people who know to look for it can find it, there are a few tricks you can use:Color the text the same as the background (white on white). Shrink the font. Hide text in the header/footer. Combine any of the above.You can then ‘reveal’ the text by highlighting the respective area or...

Text mode conferencing is one of the oldest forms of communications on the internet. You commonly know this as participating in a "chat room." This form of communication has lasted as long has for three very good reasons:It requires the least possible bandwidth necessary in order to do it. You don’t get any smaller in bandwidth usage than plain...

For those of you who send emails as text messages to cell phones, you’re well aware that you have to a) send in plain text only and b) count your characters to make sure you don’t trip the 140-character limit. Setting email to send in plain text in easy. In popular email providers such as Yahoo! Mail there is an option right at the top to change from...

YouTube (finally) put some profanity censoring in their text comment system after years of angry complaints from many, many users of the system. The moment this went into effect there were people right on top of this: Note the second comment above. Let it not be said that all YouTube "community members" are dumb. If you still want to see the...

A really, really long time ago, people accessed their e-mail using text-based clients. One popular (said loosely) client was PINE. When I say text-based, I mean text-based. No GUI. No JavaScript. No images. No formatted fonts. No HTML. Nothing but text. There are a smattering of people on the internet that to this day swear by PINE and absolutely will not use...

MS-DOS Editor is a DOS-based text editor that comes with 32-bit Windows XP Home and Professional (As well as virtually all other versions of Windows before it.)Since Notepad can only handle small files; Editor is sometimes used as a substitute for Notepad. It is a Text User Interface; the color scheme of which is adjustable. Editor can edit files that are up...

I’ll answer that question even before I start this article: Yes, you are. And you always have been since the first time you used text messaging on a mobile wireless network. The reason you’re getting screwed is because those who are computer savvy even to the most basic degree understand that when you charge 20 cents for 140 bytes of data or less...