What is a TXT file?
TXT — plain text
Use the format TXT
A concrete example
A list of instructions can become a DOCX to be formatted, or a PDF to be printed and shared.
What does the conversion change?
DOCX adds an editable container but cannot retrieve styles that did not exist. PDF composes pages from text and its line breaks.
Useful checks
The encoding must be recognized correctly: check accents and symbols. Columns aligned with spaces may shift with a different font.
Choose a conversion
Keep the original and open the result in the software or on the device that will need to use it.
Your questions about this format
How to recognize a scanned PDF and use the OCR?
Open the PDF and try to select then copy a sentence in a text editor. If only an image is selected, the document may be a scan without recognized text. A PDF protection may also prevent copying. In ConvertLab, add the PDF, then choose "Text Recognition (OCR)" in "PDF Action" during the preparation step. This NoLimit option produces a PDF with a text layer. Download it, then, if you want a Word document, use this result for a conversion to DOCX. Proofread the names and numbers: a blurry scan can cause errors.
Will the layout be preserved in Word?
A PDF describes pages, while Word rearranges text and objects. Columns, complex tables, and fonts may therefore change. For a document to be edited, choose DOCX and plan for a review. To maintain a page appearance, choose a JPEG or PNG output; the text in these images will not be directly editable.
Why is my compressed PDF so large?
An already optimized file can decrease very little, or even increase. The NoLimit compression option does not promise a reduction percentage. Compare the sizes indicated after processing and keep the file that suits you best without overwriting your original.
How to convert a presentation into a Word document?
Add your PPTX and choose DOCX. The "Editable Text" mode makes it easier to reuse the content; the "Slides as Images" mode preserves a visual representation of the slides, but their text cannot be edited like a Word paragraph. Choose the mode before starting the conversion.
What is it?
TXT contains nothing but characters: no bold, no font, no image, no page. It's the simplest format there is, and the most universal — the only one that virtually every machine has been able to read for sixty years.
This bareness is a strength. A text file has no version, no proprietary software, no internal structure to corrupt. It travels through the decades without losing a thing.
History & origin
Plain text was born with computing itself. The ASCII table, published in 1963, assigns a number to each Latin character — 128 in all, enough for English but leaving accented letters out in the cold.
The arrival of Unicode, and then its UTF-8 encoding in the early 1990s, solved the problem by covering every writing system in the world. That's why an old file can display "é" instead of "é": it was written in one encoding and is being read in another.
Why it is useful
Universal, tiny, indestructible, readable by any device and any program. It's the ideal format for notes, logs, data meant for automated processing, or code.
It lends itself beautifully to bulk processing: a script can read, filter, and transform millions of lines without ever opening an office application.
Limits & drawbacks
No formatting, no headings, no images, no tables. A TXT file will never make a presentable document.
Two classic pitfalls: encoding, which turns accented letters into gibberish if it isn't respected, and line endings, which differ between Windows and the rest of the world — hence those files that display as one endless single line.
Practical tips
Always save in UTF-8: it's the only sensible choice today, and it will spare you broken accented characters.
To turn notes into a presentable document, convert the TXT file to DOCX or PDF. If your text has a structure — headings, lists — use Markdown instead, which will preserve it.
Convert your TXT in seconds, on our secure servers in France.
Convert a TXT