ASCII text, ANSI text, Text Only and DOS text are all names for plain text.

Most word-processors insert special hidden codes into text files to help them keep track of page numbers, bold type and so on. Oxford WordSmith Tools can handle them anyway but you'll get cleaner results if you use plain text without the hidden codes.

If your source texts were saved as "Text Only with line breaks" there will probably be one <Enter> every 70 or 80 characters at the end of each text line. If they were saved as "Text Only", the <Enters> will be equivalent to paragraph breaks. I recommend saving as "Text Only".

The Windows program Notepad (Start | Program Files | Accessories) makes plain text files or .txt files. It uses basic character sets e.g. A to Z, numbers and common punctuation symbols. The main difference is in the accented characters. For more on this, see character sets.

See also : HTML,SGML & XML.