About TXT Files
Plain Text
TXT files contain unformatted plain text with no styling, images, or layout information. They are universally readable by any device and operating system, making them the simplest document format.
Family
Documents & Text
Extension
.txt
MIME Type
text/plain
Can Use As
HOW TXT
CAME TO BE.
The plain text file predates almost every other format on this page. When ASCII was standardized in 1963 (with a 1967 revision) it defined the 128 characters that every computer of the era would agree on. A file that contained nothing but those characters, separated by newlines, was the simplest possible document — and it became the universal interchange format for source code, configuration files, logs, and correspondence.
The arrival of Unicode in the 1990s — and UTF-8 in particular — extended the plain text file to cover every writing system on Earth without changing its core premise: just characters, no styling. Fifty years on, .txt is still the most portable format in existence.
CURIOSITIES &
TRIVIA.
Every operating system disagrees about what a "line ending" is: CRLF on Windows, LF on Unix, CR on classic Mac.
UTF-8 was designed by Ken Thompson and Rob Pike on a placemat at a New Jersey diner in 1992.
The largest text file ever published is the English Wikipedia XML dump — over 100 GB uncompressed.
A .txt file can theoretically hold any content; only by convention does it mean "plain text".
The Byte Order Mark (BOM) at the start of some UTF files is a zero-width, invisible character that trips up countless parsers.
STRENGTHS &
LIMITATIONS.
Strengths
- Universally readable — every operating system, every editor, every programming language.
- Zero metadata overhead: the file size equals the character count (for ASCII).
- Safe to diff, grep, version-control, and pipe through command-line tools.
- Immune to format obsolescence: a text file from 1970 still opens today.
- Tiny footprint for structured data like logs or configuration.
Limitations
- No styling, images, or embedded structure — just characters.
- Character encoding ambiguity (ISO-8859-1 vs UTF-8 vs Windows-1252) causes "mojibake".
- Line-ending differences between OSes still cause subtle bugs today.
- No way to carry hyperlinks, tables, or formatting without a convention on top (like Markdown).
Typical Sizes & Weights
Short note
< 1 KB
README file
2–20 KB
Full novel (~90,000 words)
500 KB – 1 MB
Server log file (daily)
10 MB – 1 GB
Technical Specifications
- MIME type
- text/plain
- Common encodings
- UTF-8, UTF-16, ASCII, ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252
- Line endings
- LF (Unix), CRLF (Windows), CR (classic Mac)
- Max file size
- Limited only by filesystem (no format-level limit)
- Structure
- None — flat sequence of characters
CONVERT FROM
TXT
CONVERT TO
TXT
Common Use Cases
Notes, logs, configuration files, data exchange, READMEs.
Related Formats
Popular comparisons
TXT vs DOCX
Differences, file size, and when to choose each format.
TXT vs MD
Differences, file size, and when to choose each format.
TXT vs HTML
Differences, file size, and when to choose each format.
TXT vs EPUB
Differences, file size, and when to choose each format.
TXT vs PDF
Differences, file size, and when to choose each format.
TXT vs ODT
Differences, file size, and when to choose each format.
Popular TXT conversions
The most-requested destinations when starting from TXT.
Frequently Asked Questions about TXT
Frequently Asked Questions
TXT (Plain Text) is a document format used to store paginated text, with optional formatting, tables, images, hyperlinks, headers and footers. It sits in the documents & text family and is typically associated with a specific office suite or publishing pipeline that defined the format and ships the canonical reader.
Modern office suites — Microsoft Word, Google Docs, LibreOffice Writer, Apple Pages — open most TXT files with reasonable fidelity. If your installed software does not support TXT, convert to DOCX or PDF first using KaijuConverter; both open in virtually every reader, including free online viewers.
Upload the TXT to KaijuConverter and pick DOCX, PDF, ODT, RTF, HTML, Markdown, or plain text. Our pipeline runs LibreOffice headlessly plus pandoc for text formats — the same engines behind professional document pipelines. Styles, tables, images, and hyperlinks survive the conversion intact.
Yes, to a high degree. Standard fonts, headings, lists, tables, images, hyperlinks and page structure transfer cleanly. Custom fonts substitute to the closest match if not embedded; obscure layout features unique to TXT (frames, legacy macros) may flatten to static content in the target format.