2011-04-08 12:28:02

Basic information about plain text format and how to convert text files

About text files

A Text file is a type of computer file, which often stores plain text information in ASCII format. ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. The ASCII standard allows ASCII-only text files to be freely interchanged and readable on Unix, Macintosh, Microsoft Windows, DOS, or other platforms. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications and other devices that use text.

Modern character-encoding schemes, that support many more characters than did the original, are based on ASCII. Text files have a plethora of file suffixes, but the most used file extension to identify a simple text file is TXT or TEXT (Microsoft Windows) and the MIME type used for it is "text/plain" (MAC OS X, Linux).

You can check all Text file formats sorted by name in our Text file type category, that you can access from the main page on the left category bar.

How to convert common text files to other plain text files

Text files in plain text format do not need direct conversion. You can simply rename the file extension to other another one and its done. Plain text files do not have any special formatting and thus only the file extension dictates its type.

How to convert common text files to other formats

To convert text files to some other file formats you can simply look below the file extension description and locate the table with associated software and actions it can perform.
Simply check our database for the text file extension you are looking for and in the table below its description you will see a table with software, sorted by platform and actions, that is able to perform a specific action with the text files, such as open, edit, print etc.

Under the convert tab you can check for any convertors in our database that can convert text files to something else.

Example of vector graphics software table of recommended applications, sorted by platforms and by actions they are able to perform.

You can also click on each software to open its page on your website, that can contain additional information about it, such as developer, website, reviews or other useful articles.

If you do not have access to any specialized convertors, you can also try the following steps to convert your text files to some other file format.

Conversion to document formats

Converting text files to documents its pretty simple. Open the text file in any suitable text editor, select all data (CTRL + A), copy it to clipboard (CTRL + C). Open your favorite word processing application, such as Microsoft Word, open a new file (File → New) and Paste the text data into this new document (CTRL + V).

Now simply do any changes you want to your new document and Save it (File → Save) it. This basically converts your text file to your new document, although its not actually conversion in usual meaning.

Conversion to HTML

Much like in previous point, copy the content of the text file to a HTML editor and save the file. That will add HTML tags to the original text data.

Online convertors

Alternatively you can also always try to use some specialized converting web service, such as ZAMZAR, to convert your text files.

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