Text file
𐑑𐑧𐑒𐑕𐑑 𐑓𐑲𐑤
A text file (optional extension .TXT, amongst many others) is a plain text file with no formatting beyond tabs, possibly carriage returns, and linefeeds. It's plain text in the narrower sense that it doesn't even have formatting that is itself represented by plain text. It's just text.
Sure, you can emphasise the odd phrase by flanking it with asterisks or underscores, but it's up to the reader to interpret them. In this sense, it's much like a typewritten document. There's no software to automatically italicise, embolden, or underline their contained text, because there's no agreed-upon standard of which symbols represent which formatting.
Should you need a little standardised formatting, I'd recommend converting the file to Markdown, which is still plain text in the broader sense.
Text files may or may not be hard-wrapped to a set width, such as 72 or 80 characters per line. Whether or not longer lines are soft-wrapped is up to the reader's settings, as is the width of tabs. Due to possible hard-wrapping and indentation, not to mention ASCII art such as primitive tables, it's advisable to view text files as a grid of characters, using a fixed-width font such as Courier.
A text file can use any character set. These days, most are UTF-8. Older ones are often ASCII, which can also be thought of as the Basic Latin subset of UTF-8.
Text files can be created and edited with a text editor, such as Vim or Nano. Because it's just about the least proprietary file format in existence, pretty much any UTF-8 text file can be edited with any modern text editor, and any ASCII text file with any older editor too. You can even switch back and forth between several different editors to edit the same file, even on different machines.
In Unix and its clones, text files can be hard-wrapped with Fmt, and can be viewed in More or Less.
Project Gutenberg offers many classic books as text files.
Further reading
Encyclopedias
- "Plain Text" File Formats
File formats: SysEx file | Text file
