# Save in ASCII??
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/save-in-ascii/151909
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [January 31, 2003, 5:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/save-in-ascii/151909 "2003-01-31T17:55:04Z")
**Posts on this page:** 18
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Lao\_Tsu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lao_Tsu)
#### Post date: [January 31, 2003, 5:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/save-in-ascii/151909/1 "2003-01-31T17:55:04Z")
Long ago this was a very common option on word processors. Do you happen to know of any common applications that you could load a word doc and then save it in ASCII?
Thanks.
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### Author:  [@Lao\_Tsu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lao_Tsu)
#### Post date: [January 31, 2003, 6:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/save-in-ascii/151909/2 "2003-01-31T18:02:24Z")
Ooops… apparently young whippersnappers refer to this as plain-text.
[Emily Latella]
Never mind.
[/Emily Latella}
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### Author:  [@sciguy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sciguy)
#### Post date: [January 31, 2003, 6:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/save-in-ascii/151909/3 "2003-01-31T18:05:42Z")
Sure, it’s usually labeled “Save as text”. At least on Windows, saving a file as \*.txt removes any doc-specific formatting, leaving only standard ASCII characters. You may or may not get linefeeds (since the word processor just used word-wrap) depending on what app you’re using.
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### Author:  [@Lao\_Tsu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lao_Tsu)
#### Post date: [January 31, 2003, 6:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/save-in-ascii/151909/4 "2003-01-31T18:10:23Z")
Thanks sciguy! How embarassin’:dubious:
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### Author:  [@dwc1970](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dwc1970)
#### Post date: [January 31, 2003, 9:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/save-in-ascii/151909/5 "2003-01-31T21:35:22Z")
If you do want to save a plain text file with line feeds in Word use the option “Text only with line breaks (_.txt)". By saving the file as "Text only (_.txt)” the text will wrap. For good measure I also use a monospace font before saving (such as Courier) to ensure that each line in the plain text file is of relatively uniform length.
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### Author:  [@Duckster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Duckster)
#### Post date: [January 31, 2003, 9:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/save-in-ascii/151909/6 "2003-01-31T21:47:18Z")
> [@](#):
>
> \*Originally posted by dwc1970 \*
> For good measure I also use a monospace font before saving (such as Courier) to ensure that each line in the plain text file is of relatively uniform length.
Doesn’t matter. ASCII is ASCII. The font attribute applies to the tool reading the text and not within the text itself.
If you save it as text using a Courier monospace font in MS Word, and later open it in a text editor where the default font is Times Roman, you will see it according to the text editor’s default font attributes (Times Roman).
ASCII is ASCII.
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### Author:  [@GuanoLad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GuanoLad)
#### Post date: [January 31, 2003, 9:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/save-in-ascii/151909/7 "2003-01-31T21:54:02Z")
When I FTP a file to a web server, there are two options. Transfer in ASCII, and transfer in Binary.
ASCII is for text files - including HTML, CSS, CGI, Perl, any file that is basically just words and letters.
Binary is for images and video and sound files, where though they can be read as text, it’s pretty much gobbledegook, so they have to be transferred in the special format of Binary in order to work properly.
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### Author:  [@dwc1970](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dwc1970)
#### Post date: [January 31, 2003, 10:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/save-in-ascii/151909/8 "2003-01-31T22:09:35Z")
> [@](#):
>
> \*Originally posted by Duckster \*
> \*\*Doesn’t matter. ASCII is ASCII. The font attribute applies to the tool reading the text and not within the text itself.
>
> If you save it as text using a Courier monospace font in MS Word, and later open it in a text editor where the default font is Times Roman, you will see it according to the text editor’s default font attributes (Times Roman).
>
> ASCII is ASCII. \*\*
I should have clarified this some more. I realize that the font used will not matter in terms of the appearance of the text, as different applications will render its appearance by its default font. The reason I use a monospaced font before saving a plain text document is to make each line more uniform in length. To illustrate this, I just created a file in Word using 10-point Times New Roman. I entered a string of lowercase W’s to fill one line and then on the next line I entered a string of lowercase I’s. The first line contained 49 W’s and the second line contained 129 I’s. In a plain text file this is very unbalanced. When I repeated this exercise using Courier 10 each line contained 80 characters. I realize most documents won’t have this much variance in line length, but I used w and i because of the differences in their widths when using a proportional font.
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### Author:  [@Robot\_Arm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Robot_Arm)
#### Post date: [February 1, 2003, 12:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/save-in-ascii/151909/9 "2003-02-01T00:51:17Z")
> [@](#):
>
> \*Originally posted by GuanoLad \*
> When I FTP a file to a web server, there are two options. Transfer in ASCII, and transfer in Binary.
>
> ASCII is for text files - including HTML, CSS, CGI, Perl, any file that is basically just words and letters.
>
> Binary is for images and video and sound files, where though they can be read as text, it’s pretty much gobbledegook, so they have to be transferred in the special format of Binary in order to work properly.
A file’s a file. Inside it’s all '1’s and '0’s, and when you copy a file it should look just like the original, no matter what the format.
The reason FTP gives you ASCII and binary options has to do with how ASCII files mark the end of a line under different operating systems. Unix and Linux mark the end of a line with the ASCII ‘Line Feed’ character; Microsoft uses two ASCII characters, ‘Carriage Return’ and ‘Line Feed’. (And I find from my research that Macs use just ‘Carriage Return’.) When you tell FTP that you’re transferring an ASCII file, it figures out which OSes the source and destination are, and replaces the end-of-line characters if required.
This is one of the things old-time programmers used to gripe about Microsoft for.
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### Author:  [@GuanoLad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GuanoLad)
#### Post date: [February 1, 2003, 10:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/save-in-ascii/151909/10 "2003-02-01T10:24:07Z")
I keep getting misinformed about computer crap, and then I mis-remember it too.
Doggone it.
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### Author:  [@MC\_E](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MC_E)
#### Post date: [February 1, 2003, 3:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/save-in-ascii/151909/11 "2003-02-01T15:34:27Z")
> [@](#):
>
> \*Originally posted by GuanoLad \*
> \*\*I keep getting misinformed about computer crap, and then I mis-remember it too.
>
> Doggone it. \*\*
I wouldn’t say you were wrong… If you transfer an executable in ascii mode it usually won’t work, regardless of the reason.
MC$E
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### Author:  [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)
#### Post date: [February 1, 2003, 4:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/save-in-ascii/151909/12 "2003-02-01T16:21:14Z")
I thought it had to do with the transfer mode – 7 bits per byte sent for ASCII (the remaining bit was originally used as a check bit??), 8 bits per byte sent for binary mode. If you upload your JPEG using ASCII mode, it makes useless confetti out of your file. In 7 bit mode you send less information about the file being sent. Trying to send a binary file that way is like trying to send a photograph over a teletype machine.
OK, correct me if I’m wrong.
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### Author:  [@GuanoLad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GuanoLad)
#### Post date: [February 2, 2003, 8:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/save-in-ascii/151909/13 "2003-02-02T08:33:09Z")
Yeah, see that’s what I thought too. But now I’m all confuzzled.
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### Author:  [@Robot\_Arm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Robot_Arm)
#### Post date: [February 2, 2003, 11:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/save-in-ascii/151909/14 "2003-02-02T11:02:34Z")
I did a little googling and I found a reference that ftp takes advantage of some property of ASCII files to compress and decompress them to speed up the transfer, and that process will screw up binary files. I found other pages which don’t mention that at all. It may not be implemented in all ftp programs.
I did find a [cite](http://wolves.dreamhost.com/web/html/ftp01.htm) to confirm my end-of-line description above.
And if you have access to the appropriate machines, give it a whirl. Create a small text file (more than one line long), ftp it in ASCII mode between Unix/Linux and DOS/Windows and then compare the lengths of the two files.
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### Author:  [@PetW](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PetW)
#### Post date: [February 2, 2003, 4:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/save-in-ascii/151909/15 "2003-02-02T16:04:25Z")
> [@](#):
>
> \*Originally posted by Duckster \*
> \*\*ASCII is ASCII. \*\*
> [@](#):
>
> \*Originally posted by Robot Arm \*
> **A file’s a file.**
Fascinating
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### Author:  [@jjimm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jjimm)
#### Post date: [February 2, 2003, 4:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/save-in-ascii/151909/16 "2003-02-02T16:17:21Z")
> [@](#):
>
> \*Originally posted by PetW \*
> \*\*Fascinating \*\*
Fascinating is fascinating.
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### Author:  [@Hail\_Ants](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hail_Ants)
#### Post date: [February 2, 2003, 8:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/save-in-ascii/151909/17 "2003-02-02T20:30:50Z")
OP:
> [@](#):
>
> Long ago this was a very common option on word processors. Do you happen to know of any common applications that you could load a word doc and then save it in ASCII?
> Thanks.
WordPad, which comes with every copy of Windows, will do exactly that. It will read Word .doc files and it can save in plain text format.
That’s **WordPad** not Notepad.
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### Author:  [@GusNSpot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GusNSpot)
#### Post date: [February 2, 2003, 8:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/save-in-ascii/151909/18 "2003-02-02T20:36:07Z")
> [@](#):
>
> \*Originally posted by Hail Ants \*
> \*\*OP:WordPad, which comes with every copy of Windows, will do exactly that. It will read Word .doc files and it can save in plain text format.
>
> That’s **WordPad** not Notepad. \*\*
Damn M$ for that !!!