What exactly is rich text? How is it different from normal text?
by 
David Sims
ANSWERS: 3
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The differance between rich and normal is in rich you can do things like bold, underline, copy & paste, and decide where you want the text - in the left or right margin etc. http://hmail.flamingtext.com/hmail/2003/12/05/flamingtext_com_1070660118_22106.gif
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Well, that link in the post before mine is not an example of rich text, it's an example of a flaming ugly gif file. Rich text does include bold, underline, italicized, etc, but it also includes other font formats, like strikethrough, shadow, emboss, multiple colors, multiple fonts, and multiple sizes.
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The slightly more technical answer is that they're just different file formats. Rich text files contain special tags which resemble the basics of HTML; these instruct the browser or word processor to display the file with special formatting (underline and strikethrough, bold, italic, etc.). They can also contain font instructions. A true text file, on the other hand, only contains the data of the file. The way it's displayed is completely up to the program that's being used to read it. There are a few ways to tell the difference between them. The easiest one is to check the file extension: if it's a .rtx, it's rich text, and if it's .txt, it's plaintext. If that doesn't help, open the file and view it; if it has special formatting, it's rich text. If that STILL doesn't help, read the file with a program you're sure is a text editor--NOT a word processor. In Windows, use notepad (under Accessories, or just Start->Run->Notepad). In Linux, just cat the file ("cat filename"); in a Mac terminal you can probably do the same. You'll see HTML-like tags if it's a rich text file.
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