Processing Text

Text is normally processed with a word processor program. This will allow various operations to be performed, many of which will be do to with the way that the text is set out. The program will allow the user to set the page size, adjust margins, chose different fonts and sizes. Other, non-formatting processes that can be carried out on the text include checking spelling by comparing words in the text with words stored in a dictionary, searching and replacing particular words or combinations of letters and providing a word count for the document.

When a document is stored then the additional formatting data will be stored along with the text itself. Each word processor program will use its own format to store the data. This means that documents created with one word processor are not immediately readable by another. Most word processor programs would however provide import facilities that would translate documents produced by another program into their own format. It is also usual to be able to save documents as text. In this case none of the formatting data is saved and the resulting text file can be read by any text processing program since it consists only of an agreed set of codes (ASCII Codes) with each code representing particular character.

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