tion, headers, footers, footnotes . . . everything. Everything is exactly as it
should look.
must print the same way on every printer and look the same on every com-
puter. Even the fonts are taken care of--you can automatically embed into
the PDF file the font characters the document needs. The main drawback is
that people can't easily edit the text unless they buy Adobe Acrobat. Unfor-
tunately, PDF files are very large, and PDF files from untrusted sources might
also carry viruses. But the risks of catching a virus by viewing and printing
a PDF file are slim. See the section "PDF Was Made for This" later in this
chapter.
nounced "ask-ee") text files contain only the text of your document with no
formatting whatsoever (no fonts, no spacing, and tables are turned into text
spaced with tabs). Plain ASCII files can't harbor viruses (except perhaps as
source code that can't execute by itself), which makes them safe. All text
editing programs can edit ASCII text files, which date back to the Model-T
era of the computer industry. Any decent spreadsheet program can read an
ASCII file's tab-delimited characters saved from a table and convert the mess
back into a table.
preted or compiled into code for the programs to work.
displays and modern printers. If you've received ASCII text files, then you
know that the text might all be in a single line, 10,000 words long, or have
weird characters and control codes scattered about. It might appear stunted
with only 35 characters per line, and you spend half a day positioning the
cursor just so and deleting backward to remove these line breaks (an oper-
ation likely to crash Word).
codes (such as a character that marks the end of a line). Each letter or other character is
represented by a number: an uppercase A, for example, is the number 65, and a lower-
case z is the number 122. (Software engineer Jim Price has a nice ASCII chart at
www.jimprice.com/jim-asc.htm.)