I'm afraid that if you can't accept this, then you may have a hard time accepting the existence of any kind of "plain" text at all. After all, what text does not include format? This does. How?
Well, a paragraph is separated by a new line. Sentences are separated by periods and the first word of sentence of capitalized. White space is used to delimit words within sentences--with some exceptions, as just shown.
Really I don't think there is an objective definition of a term like "plain text" and it's even context sensitive. If I tell somebody my software can be configured with a JSON file, and they ask "what's a JSON file?", I might respond that it's "just a plain text format" to convey that they can open the thing in Notepad and have a reasonable chance of understanding and editing it. On the other hand, if I get some software that receives emails in an inbox and parses them to load data into a table, and it claims to support "plain text emails only" I wouldn't send it HTML emails and think I'm doing it right because "HTML is plain text".
If you absolutely must have an objective definition, I might try saying that "plain text" is WYSIWYG Unicode or ASCII. WYSIWYG meaning the formatting it exhibits when displayed is the same formatting it exhibits in the editor, and Unicode or ASCII meaning only the formatting available from those character encodings is available (so a Word Document doesn't count as plain text even though it is WYSIWYG).
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