Plain text
File Formats > Electronic File Formats > Document > TXT
Description
Plain text in no particular format. See Text-based data for some structured formats that are stored in plain text (and hence can be opened in a plain text editor if no more specific program is available).
Text files might be in any Character Encoding. Traditionally, ASCII was used much of the time for maximum interoperability, but for non-English text an encoding supporting a broader character repertoire is needed, often UTF-8 nowadays. Another point of contention or incompatibility in text-file formats is the conventions for line and paragraph breaks. Traditionally, text files were designed to fit on an 80-column-wide screen (or 40-column in the case of some early personal computers), with hard line breaks between each line, but different operating systems varied in how a line break was stored, between CR+LF (ASCII 13 and 10 decimal) or just LF alone or CR alone. Newer files are often stored with no line breaks except between paragraphs, expecting the editing/viewing programs to automaticaly wrap the lines for display.
Most operating systems include a simple text editor (e.g., Windows Notepad) which can open text files, but many other text editors exist (and computer people sometimes have "holy wars" over which one is best). Some text editors include EMACS, vi, and UltraEdit.
Identifiers
- File extension: .TXT (though plain text might be stored in other extensions as well)
- MIME type (Internet media type): text/plain
