American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) is a text and control-code character set used in computers. Pronounced “ASS-kee.” ASCII is a simple text based format, nothing more. There can be numerous ASCII format files produced relating to PCBs and PCB design packages. The PCB ASCII file format is self explanatory with all values and parameters named in the file itself. The format is arranged into records with each record taking a line in the file. The records are sorted by record name.