What is a TXT file?
A TXT file is text and nothing else: no fonts, no layout, nothing to go wrong. It opens instantly in anything, on any system, and it will still open decades from now. You can convert TXT files here, both into the format and out of it.
Specification
| Full name | Plain Text File |
|---|---|
| Extensions | .txt, .text |
| Media type | text/plain |
| Compression | Uncompressed |
| Transparency | — |
| Animation | — |
| Multiple pages | — |
| Colour depth | UTF-8, UTF-16 or legacy single-byte encodings |
| Size limits | — |
| Introduced | 1963 |
| Developed by | ASCII committee, later Unicode Consortium |
| Standard | Open |
| Browser support | Every browser, including older ones |
What TXT is used for
- Logs, configuration files and command output
- Extracting readable text out of a PDF or word processor document
- Data handed to scripts and text processing pipelines
- Long-term archives where any future system must still read the content
Strengths and limitations
What TXT does well
- Readable by every piece of software ever written, with nothing to interpret
- Smallest possible representation of the words themselves
- Nothing can break: there is no structure to corrupt
Where TXT falls short
- No formatting, images, tables or links of any kind
- Encoding is not recorded in the file, so mis-detection mangles accents
- Line endings differ between platforms and can display as one long line
Convert TXT to
Every target this format can be written out as, each on its own page.
Convert to TXT
Everything that can be turned into a TXT file.
Questions about TXT
What is a .txt file?
A TXT file is text and nothing else: no fonts, no layout, nothing to go wrong. The extension .txt or .text identifies it, and its media type is text/plain.
How do I open a TXT file?
Any current browser will open it directly, so dragging the file into a tab is usually enough. Most operating systems also preview it without extra software.
Is TXT lossy or lossless?
Uncompressed. Nothing is discarded, so repeated saves never degrade the contents.
What is TXT good for?
Readable by every piece of software ever written, with nothing to interpret. Smallest possible representation of the words themselves. Nothing can break: there is no structure to corrupt. In practice that makes it a good fit for logs, configuration files and command output, and Extracting readable text out of a PDF or word processor document.
What are the drawbacks of TXT?
No formatting, images, tables or links of any kind. Encoding is not recorded in the file, so mis-detection mangles accents. Line endings differ between platforms and can display as one long line.