Notebooks [...] are the plain text files of the analogue world.
That's a good analogy for other reasons. Only people who can read your handwriting and know what language it should be in have a change of being able to read your "plain text". For example, have fun reading handwritten German in Kurrent (or Sütterlin): https://kurent.bastan.cz/ - and these are really, really legible fonts.
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Related (in my mind, at least):
Notebooks without lines are the plain text files of the analogue world.
No lines to dictate how and what you want to write or draw.
That's a good analogy for other reasons. Only people who can read your handwriting and know what language it should be in have a change of being able to read your "plain text". For example, have fun reading handwritten German in Kurrent (or Sütterlin): https://kurent.bastan.cz/ - and these are really, really legible fonts.
Or dotted notebooks which allow the free-form, but help if you do need things to be level , line up etc.