The ASCII format defines the basic character set for computers. It’s made up of 128 characters. An text file contains only the characters and simple formatting controls such as paragraph returns and tabs. All of the visual effects added by today’s word processing programs such as typefaces, font sizes, colors, line and paragraph spacing, tables and graphics are not available in the ASCII format. Most application output text including databases and spreadsheets. This data is used to feed into reports, statements and dashboards which require formatting. Typical uses for text output include content indexing, content searching, data processing, data reuse.

Text files are quite simple with fixed character spacing.

example of ascii text file

Visual Integrity’s has command-line and API tools to extract ASCII and Unicode text from PDF and PostScript files. With the PDF Conversion Server, you can: :

  • Create clean ASCII text files in several formats – stripped, with placement, or excerpted
  • Invoke precision controls to ensure precise text placement on each page
  • Handle text extraction in multi-page documents
  • Support both portrait and landscape-oriented pages
  • Intelligent filter parameters carefully align the horizontal and vertical position of every text string in ASCII output
  • Options to optimize output for unstructured and structured page layouts