What is a TXT file?
TXT — plain text
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.
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