Turn TXT files into Markdown
Convert a TXT into a Markdown right here on the page. Markdown is the usual choice for README files and technical documentation in code repositories. Worth knowing: a Markdown will not open in a browser tab, so it is a file for software rather than for the web. Your file never leaves your computer.
Need the other direction? Convert Markdown to TXT
How to convert TXT to Markdown
- 1 Drop your TXT .txt or .text file onto the page, or click to browse for it.
- 2 Check the options. Nothing is thrown away on the way to Markdown, so there is no quality dial to set.
- 3 Convert. The work happens on your own machine, so how long it takes depends on your computer and the file.
- 4 Download the Markdown, or add more files and do the whole set in one go.
Why convert TXT to Markdown
- Readable and editable as plain text with no special software.
- Diffs cleanly in version control, unlike binary document formats.
- README files and technical documentation in code repositories.
- TXT: encoding is not recorded in the file, so mis-detection mangles accents.
TXT compared with Markdown
How the two formats differ on the things that decide whether a conversion is worth making.
| Property | TXT | Markdown |
|---|---|---|
| File extension | .txt | .md |
| Colour depth | UTF-8, UTF-16 or legacy single-byte encodings | UTF-8 plain text, parsed to an HTML document tree |
| Browser support | Every browser | No browser support |
| Introduced | 1963 | 2004 |
| Developed by | ASCII committee, later Unicode Consortium | John Gruber and Aaron Swartz |
Quality and what changes
Both sides are lossless, so every pixel survives the trip intact and converting back returns the same image. What changes is the size and what the file can carry: Markdown stores the data without compression, so expect a much larger file.
- Browsers will not display a Markdown, so it downloads rather than opening in a tab.
- One Markdown limitation to keep in mind: dialects differ, so tables and footnotes work in some parsers and not others.
Questions about TXT to Markdown
Can I open a Markdown in a browser?
No. No mainstream browser renders Markdown natively, so it will download rather than display. That is fine when the file is heading into desktop software or an archive, and a problem if it is going on a web page.
Is my TXT file uploaded anywhere?
No. The whole thing runs inside the browser tab you already have open. Your TXT is read straight from your own disk, converted on your machine and handed back as a Markdown. Nothing is sent anywhere, nothing is stored and there is no account.
Is there a file size limit?
There is no server-side limit because no server sees the file. The real ceiling is your device memory, since the input and the output both have to fit in the tab. A few hundred megabytes is usually fine on a desktop machine and considerably less on a phone.
Can I convert several TXT files at once?
Yes. Add as many as you like and they are processed one after another, then offered as separate Markdown downloads or as a single ZIP. Speed depends on your own processor rather than on a queue.
Does the converter work offline?
Yes, after the page has loaded once. The engine is cached by the browser, so you can disconnect, reload and keep converting. That falls out of doing the work locally rather than being a separate mode you switch on.