Plain text converter

TXT is a label for plain text, not a complete format promise. A .txt file may contain prose, logs, source snippets, tabular data, OCR output, fixed-width reports, or copied email bodies. Its MIME type says the bytes should be interpreted as text, but it does not define structure, style, images, footnotes, tables, or metadata. Conversion starts by deciding what kind of text it is. Our routes treat TXT as a document when converting to Markdown, HTML, DOCX, ODT, RTF, LaTeX, reStructuredText, EPUB, or PDF, and as delimited data when the target is CSV, TSV, JSON, JSONL, YAML, XML, XLSX, ODS, SQL, or Parquet.

Encoding is the first version problem because plain text has no container metadata. Modern files are usually UTF-8, sometimes with a byte order mark. Older Windows exports may be CP1252, while older Unix data may be ISO-8859-1 or another local encoding. Line endings vary between LF, CRLF, and old CR-only files. Tabs may mean indentation, table fields, or both. Some text files also include control characters, form feeds, printer escape sequences, or NUL bytes from accidental binary data. A converter can normalize many of these details, but it cannot infer document semantics from bytes that never carried them.

Writers and readers include text editors, log collectors, scanners, command-line programs, help systems, note apps, database exports, and office suites. A TXT exported from Word may preserve paragraph breaks but lose headings, lists, and footnotes. A TXT extracted from PDF may have hard line breaks at every visual line. A fixed-width mainframe report may align only in a monospaced font. A tabular TXT file may need delimiter detection before it can become a spreadsheet. The right target depends on whether people need readable prose, machine-readable records, or a printable artifact.

Plain text conversion breaks when layout is mistaken for structure. Wrapping at 80 characters is not a paragraph model. Spaces that align columns are not cells unless the pattern is consistent. A separator line of dashes may mean a heading underline in reStructuredText, a table border, or decoration. TXT to PDF can preserve readable text, but it typesets a new document rather than restoring the original source. TXT to XLSX or CSV requires a delimiter choice. Before converting, inspect a few lines near the top, middle, and bottom, decide whether repeated headers should be removed, and document the encoding assumption.

Official Plain text specification