How does ASCII help in text processing?

ASCII, which stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard that plays a crucial role in text processing. It provides a systematic way of representing text characters (including letters, digits, and symbols) in digital form by assigning each character a unique numeric code. This encoding allows computers and other devices to store, transmit, and manipulate text data consistently.

When text is processed, it is important for systems to understand what each character represents; ASCII ensures compatibility and standardization across different platforms and applications. For instance, the letter 'A' is represented by the decimal number 65 in ASCII, and this representation is universally recognized by systems that adhere to the ASCII standard.

The other options do not accurately capture the primary function of ASCII in text processing. While it doesn’t enable color representation, allow direct printing, or solely translate text to binary, its main purpose is to provide a framework for character representation in a way that makes text manipulation and processing possible and efficient.