TXT file format
TXT is plain text and nothing else: no fonts, no layout, no metadata. It opens on every device ever made and is the format text outlives everything else in.
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What is TXT?
A .txt file contains characters and line breaks, full stop. There is no specification to implement and no version to be incompatible with, which is why plain text has outlasted every word processor that ever tried to replace it. Documents written in it forty years ago open perfectly today, which is not true of most formats from that era.
The one thing a text file does not record is how its characters are encoded. UTF-8, UTF-16 and older regional code pages all produce valid .txt files, and opening one under the wrong assumption is what turns accented letters and non-Latin scripts into strings of question marks or symbols. UTF-8 is the modern default and the right answer in nearly every case.
Line endings are the other quiet incompatibility. Windows ends lines with carriage return plus line feed, while Unix, Linux and macOS use line feed alone — which is why a file written on one system sometimes appears as a single run-on line, or shows stray characters, on another. Most modern editors handle both silently.
| Extension | .txt |
|---|---|
| Category | Document |
| MIME type | text/plain |
| Compression | None (uncompressed) |
TXT: frequently asked questions
- Why does my TXT file show garbled characters?
- It is being opened with the wrong encoding. The file gives no hint about whether it is UTF-8, UTF-16 or a legacy code page, so the editor guesses. Reopening it explicitly as UTF-8 usually restores accented and non-Latin text immediately.
- What is the difference between CRLF and LF?
- Windows marks the end of a line with carriage return plus line feed; Unix, Linux and macOS use line feed alone. A file made on one platform can look like one long line, or show visible artefacts, on the other. Modern editors normalise this automatically.
- Does a TXT file keep any formatting?
- None. Bold, italics, fonts, colours, images, tables and page layout do not exist in plain text. Converting a document to TXT is a deliberate act of stripping everything except the words, which is exactly why it is useful.
- What opens a TXT file?
- Everything. Notepad, TextEdit, every code editor, every browser, every phone, every terminal. It is the closest thing computing has to a universal format, and it needs no software beyond what your device already has.
- Why would I convert a document to TXT?
- To get the words out cleanly: feeding text into a script, an analysis tool, a search index or an AI model, diffing two versions, or rescuing content from a document whose formatting is broken. Plain text is the format that other tools can always parse.
- Is there a size limit for TXT files?
- Not in the format itself — a text file can be gigabytes. The practical limit is the editor: simple ones like Notepad struggle past tens of megabytes, while editors designed for large files handle multi-gigabyte logs without loading everything into memory.