Plain Text File
Writableother
Plain text files (also known by the extension 'TXT') consists of human-readable characters encoded sequentially in a particular "character encoding". The plain-text description in PRONOM provides a baseline identifier for all TXT (*.txt) files that may be identified by tools such as DROID. Plain text (x-fmt/111) cannot have a file format signature associated with it where other formats with 'txt' extensions will tend to. The character encoding of plain-text files may not be known upfront and is rarely indicated inline (in the file itself), but can be identified using additional tooling such as using the '-i' encoding flag in the UNIX/Linux 'file' command. Many human readable file-formats are built using plain-text as its foundation, and source code files, such as those written in Python, C++, or Java; or data structures saved to file, such as YAML or JSON, can be opened in text editors just as easily as .txt files. The primary difference between these structured files and plain-text is the structure that is may be encoded in the file and the format as implied by the file format extension.
Identify it
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Open it
- Apache SparkOpen source
- CUBRIDOpen source
- DLL2DEFOpen source
- eScriptoriumOpen source
- ImageMagickOpen source
- KeynoteOpen source
- LibreOffice WriterOpen source
- LifeLinesOpen source
- NeuronOpen source
- PandocOpen source
- Q141674354Open source
- Q220993Open source
- SPINA CarbOpen source
- SPINA ThyrOpen source
- TesseractOpen source
- WebAnnoOpen source
- AbiWordOpen source
- AnkiOpen source
- AquadOpen source
- BasKet Note PadsOpen source
- Bio-Formats LibraryOpen source
- CeltxOpen source
- Coding Analysis ToolkitOpen source
- gprMaxOpen source
- HexatomicOpen source
- jEditOpen source
- NoalyssOpen source
- Notational VelocityOpen source
- OpenNeuroOpen source
- OpenRefineOpen source
- PhotoRecOpen source
- Po4aOpen source
- Q1840839Open source
- Q747793Open source
- SciPyOpen source
- TEAOpen source
- VivaldiOpen source
And 108 more in the JSON record.
Convert it
| To | With | Fidelity | Command and losses |
|---|---|---|---|
| Portable Network Graphics | ImageMagick | Lossless | convert in.text out.pngPixels kept; some metadata, colour profiles or layers may be dropped. |
| Tagged Image File Format | ImageMagick | Lossless | convert in.text out.tifPixels kept; some metadata, colour profiles or layers may be dropped. |
| GIF 89a | ImageMagick | Lossy | convert in.text out.gifReduced to 256 colours. |
| JPEG File Interchange Format 1.02 | ImageMagick | Lossy | convert in.text out.jpgLossy compression. |
| WebP | ImageMagick | Lossy | convert in.text out.webpLossy compression. |
Sources
From Converters (FFmpeg, ImageMagick, Pandoc, LibreOffice), Just Solve the File Format Problem (File Formats Wiki), PRONOM, Wikidata. Updated 2026-10-24.