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Document format

TXT converter

A .txt file is plain text: nothing but a sequence of characters and line breaks, with no fonts, styles, or embedded objects. It is the lowest common denominator of documents — every computing device of the past several decades can open one.

Private for supported formats — processed in your browser

Convert supported files

Runs on your device

Drop TXT files here

Batch files can each use a different output. Nothing uploads for local conversions.

Working inputs include camera RAW, browser-local audio/video, PDF, CBZ/CBR comics, office documents, ebooks, markup, 3D models, structured text, images, and archives.

Where TXT comes from

Plain text predates the .txt extension itself, tracing back to teletype and punch-card character streams; ASCII, standardized in 1963, gave it a shared alphabet. Unicode and the UTF-8 encoding introduced in the early 1990s extended the same idea to every writing system without breaking existing ASCII files.

How TXT works

  • No internal structure at all — bytes plus an assumed text encoding are the entire format.
  • Line endings differ by platform (CRLF on Windows, LF on Unix and modern macOS), the classic cause of files rendering as one long line.
  • The encoding is undeclared, so readers must guess between UTF-8, Latin-1, and others; a wrong guess produces mojibake.
  • Some Windows tools prepend a UTF-8 byte-order mark (EF BB BF) that certain Unix tools then choke on.

When to use TXT

  • Notes, to-do lists, and drafts that must outlive any particular app.
  • Log files and program output.
  • README and LICENSE files in software projects.
  • A universal fallback export when nothing else is guaranteed to open.

Strengths and limitations

Strengths

  • Opens everywhere, indefinitely — no format rot possible.
  • The smallest possible representation of textual content.
  • Perfect for diffing, grepping, and version control.
  • No macro or script surface, so nothing to exploit.

Limitations

  • No formatting, images, or tables of any kind.
  • Encoding ambiguity still mangles non-English text between systems.
  • No metadata beyond the filesystem's own timestamps.

Compatibility

Notepad, TextEdit, every code editor, every browser, and every phone open .txt without hesitation. It is the one document format with genuinely universal support across operating systems and decades.

Convert TXT to another format

Convert other formats to TXT