plaintext
- A plaintext, clear text or plaintext, is an unencrypted, directly readable text, which can be fully formulated. By encrypting the plaintext with the key of the encryption algorithm, the plaintext becomes ciphertext, and by decrypting the ciphertext, the ciphertext becomes plaintext. Plaintexts are composed of the letters and digits of the plaintext alphabet with which the plaintext is encrypted. This is usually the normal alphabet with a finite number of letters and digits.
- In bar codes, a plaintext line is often inserted below the bar code. This contains the user data of the bar code, in some cases also the check digit, but no control characters. The plain text line should actually be in OCR font for optical character recognition, but is usually in a normal font. The plain text line can be used for manual character entry if the scanned barcode input is incorrect or not accepted by the computer.
