Chapter 6. Viewing and Editing Text Files

The Mac might be known for its aptitude with multimedia content—music, photos, movies, and all the rest of the stuff Apple builds its “digital hub” strategy on. But when it comes to squeezing the less well-known capabilities from your computer, particularly in the Unix layer, you’ll find that plain text data is where all the action is.

Text documents come in two varieties: plain (also known as ASCII) and rich (which can take any of several specific formats, such as RTF, HTML, and Word). Rich text is styled, meaning that it can contain special formatting, such as fonts, bold and italic text, margins, centering and justification, variable line spacing, and much more—including embedded images and tables. Plain ...

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