So many formats! Users pass around word-processing documents, spreadsheets, videos, digital photos, PDFs, and a myriad of other objects, each with a specialized format tailored to the purpose. With all the sophisticated formats in circulation today, it is worthwhile to pause and consider the power of the simple text file. An HTML file is a text file. Text files are light and easy to store and send. The humble text file is also universally understood by different operating systems – and a great many different human languages.

What else can you do with a text file? This month we look at ChordPro, a text format for displaying song chords and lyrics. Just as the Internet makes it easy to listen to songs, it also makes it very easy to play songs. Enter the name of a song in a search bar with the word chords, and you'll get a link to a site somewhere with the lyrics with chords – that's the easy part. The hard part is printing it and getting the chords to appear where they are supposed to be – neatly above the line at precisely the place where a chord change occurs. ChordPro offers an elegant solution .

And speaking of text files, Markdown is a flexible and lightweight markup format built from simple text that is used for composing forum posts, ReadMe files, and other rich-text docs. Read on for a look at a pair of powerful Markdown editors: Mark Text and VNote.