Does converting a document to TXT remove all formatting?

Yes, and that's the point: bold, fonts, colors, tables, and images are all stripped, leaving only the characters and line breaks. What survives is readable by every editor, script, and operating system ever made.

Why do strange characters appear when I open a converted TXT?

That's an encoding mismatch, usually a program expecting legacy ANSI while the file is UTF-8. Modern editors, including Windows Notepad since 2019, default to UTF-8; reopen the file with UTF-8 selected and accented letters and symbols display correctly.

Why convert a PDF or DOCX to TXT at all?

Plain text is ideal for feeding content to scripts, search indexes, and AI tools, and the size drop is huge: a 5 MB DOCX can shrink to under 100 KB. It's also the most future-proof format in existence; TXT files from the 1970s still open today.

Convert to TXT – Free TXT Converter

Convert to TXT

Convert documents between PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and more.
Preserve formatting, fonts, and layouts with our intelligent conversion engine.

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TXT is the simplest document format - pure text without any formatting. Every computer system since the dawn of computing can read plain text, making it the most universal and future-proof format for storing text content.

Convert to TXT – Free Online TXT Converter

About the Plain Text (TXT) Format

Plain text with various encodings (ASCII, UTF-8, UTF-16). No formatting support. Smallest possible file size for text.

Common Use Cases for TXT

Code and scripts
README files
Log files
Simple notes

Pros of TXT

Universal compatibility
Tiny file size
No corruption issues
Future-proof

Cons of TXT

No formatting
No images
No styling
Basic text only

How to convert files to TXT

Upload your file using the area above.
Select TXT as the target format.
Click Start and wait for the conversion to finish.
Download your converted TXT file.