unformatted

Unformatted, in computing, describes data or text that contains no typographic styling, presentation instructions, or markup. It commonly refers to plain text files that consist solely of characters without bold, italics, font changes, color, or layout formatting. It relies on character encoding such as ASCII or UTF-8.

In practice, unformatted text preserves characters and whitespace; line endings vary by platform, and the content can be read by a wide range of programs. It is generally easy to process with simple parsers because there is no embedded styling or structural markup to interpret.

Common examples include plain text files (.txt), log files, and data files that use delimiters such as comma-separated values (.csv) or tab-separated values (.tsv). It contrasts with formatted text and markup languages such as HTML, RTF, Markdown, or PDF, which include instructions for presentation or structure.

Advantages of unformatted text include portability, long-term accessibility, and human readability across systems. Its main limitations are the lack of inherent styling or layout information, minimal metadata about presentation, and potential ambiguity without explicit delimiters or conventions. Encoding issues can arise when transferring text between systems with different default encodings.

See also: plain text, ASCII, UTF-8, CSV, TSV, text editor.