How To Store File Properties In A File For Notepad

I'm not too familiar with serialization.It actually I found at this site (Java - Serialization) says that it will write and read properties of an object. I'm not quite sure how this would work as I would have thought that writing it to a text file would just do a toString() when you wrote it, but the page seems to think otherwise, and also names it .ser or something instead of .txt.

I thought, maybe this would work with my idea for a notepad that could store a Font, font color, and other settings, for the file. It would be beyond normal notepads. However, could you do this for a file as it would store text plus other things.

The upshot of this is that the same file, I was hoping to be able to be read by regular text programs like Notepad. However, could Notepad read such a modified file? Also, if notepad wrote to it, would it destroy my font properties and stuff that I'd add to it?

Also, what does this mean:

Warning: Serialized objects of this class will not be compatible with future Swing releases. The current serialization support is appropriate for short term storage or RMI between applications running the same version of Swing. As of 1.4, support for long term storage of all JavaBeans™ has been added to the java.beans package. Please see XMLEncoder.

Originally, I was going to use FileAttribute or something like that but it looked hard to do and likely not what I wanted. However, this looks more like what I want, but I'd like to know. This could be a huge breakthrough for a lot of things I was hoping to do but never could think of an efficient way to do.

Update:This serializable thing works great for my text editor but it won't work too hot if another program like Notepad reads it as it will appear like gibberish, including the text.

I had thought of having it make two files, one regular, and one that was serialized, to deal with this, but this doesn't work if I try opening a file that another text editor created that might not have this other serialized version of the file.

Also, I haven't yet tried extending File itself yet. However, I still don't see how it would work the way I'd hoped.

In a way, I want it to be like a RTF with some things used to set te font of the text area when loaded but be able to deal with opening a file made by another text editor and also have another text editor be able to read it even if my text editor created it.