@Hellena-Crainicu said in Is it possible to add styles and fonts in txt files, like in Ms Word (docx)?:
I want to know if it is possible to add styles and fonts in txt files, like in Ms Word (docx)?
For example, I want to add BOLD, ITALIC and Color, but without formatting the text in html or another language. I mean, I don’t want to add tags like <strong> </strong> or <i> , etc
Short answer: It is not possible.
Longer answer:
It is not possible, because what you would have would no longer be a plain text file. Plain text has no notion of formatting aside from a few control characters which have (relatively) agreed-upon meanings: mainly tabs and end-of-line characters. Aside from that, it’s just a stream of character codes, interpreted according to either a code page or a Unicode standard.
(In principle, I suppose someone could define a “code page” that included control characters for color, bold, italic, font assignment and so on. No existing software would know how to interpret it, though, and most people would agree it was no longer “plain text.”)
Files like docx have tags (or the equivalent of tags); it’s just that the program which displays and edits them interprets those tags and hides them so you see their effect instead of the tags themselves. It gives a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) experience, but that’s due to the editing application, not the file type.
Contrast this with html, which you usually edit in a text editor but display in a web browser. You’re aware of the tags when you create html, but viewers don’t see them or think about them.
Consider the form in which we type these posts. We can have italics and bold in our posts, but that’s because the forum software displays the text that way based on a simple form of tags (asterisks for italic, doubled asterisks for bold, square brackets followed by parentheses for links, and so on). We edit in plain text.
So, no software will display colors, bold, italics and the like without some sort of tags. The tags can be so simple (markdown, like these posts) that you can easily read and write them in a text editor, or so deeply encoded (pdf) that they can neither be displayed nor edited without software specifically designed for them. But they will have to be there.
