What exactly causes binary file “gibberish”?

Question

I haven\'t found an answer to this particular question; perhaps there isn\'t one. But I\'ve been wondering for a while about it.

What exactly causes a binary file to

Answer 1

Yes, Wordpad and Notepad and many other text editors assume that any file you open with it is a text file and will try to display the ASCII characters represented by the bytes in the file.

Hex Editors are made to view and edit binary files. They usually display each byte as a pair of hexadecimal digits instead of "1s and 0s" because it's easier to read that way.