[dwb]

If that’s our definition of “plain text”, sure. I would still rather our tools were more advanced, such that printable and non-printable formats were on a more equal footing, though. I always process structured formats through something that understands the structure, if I can, so I feel that the only benefit I regularly get out of formats being printable is that I have to use tools that only cope with printable formats. The argument starts getting a bit circular for me.

[adityaathalye]

Hm, you made me think about non-printing characters as metadata, which is of course immediately lost on printing and therefore does not round trip between digital and printed versions.

Many nonprinting characters imply some directive; line break (hard-wrap the text here, but this is not a paragraph), page break (let the rest of the page be blank, start the next paragraph overleaf), EOL (file over, bye bye), nonbreaking space (keep these two words together, always, till death do them part).

This is out-of-band information spliced in-band (with the text corpus), which a computer program can "see", but a person can't.

[zzo38computer]

Yes, I thought of what you mentioned too, and in my opinion, DER is a better format, and it is a binary format rather than text.

(In my ideas of an operating system design, there is a structured binary format (similar to DER but different) used for most files and data, so that the tools (and the command shell) would be usable consistently with most of them; and if some need special handling, you can use other programs and functions to convert them and/or handle them in a way that can be interoperable.)