Text files on Windows OS consists of several lines where each line is made up of a sequence of characters. Thus, text files can also be saved in Unicode format, with UTF-8 being the mostly used. Characters are encoded using ASCII character set, but this imposes limitation of usage on characters such as Pound Sign, Dollar and Euro sign that can’t be represented using the ASCII character set. The default character set of text files is ASCII that is used for creating and display of text file contents. This enables text editors to open such files without any other requirements. Text files have “text/plain” MIME type and have little or no formatting at all. The text file format doesn’t have any special file format specifications. There are, however, other free text editors available as well over the internet that provide you the capability to work with Text Documents like Notepad++ which is far more advanced in terms of functionality. Similarly, MacOS comes with TextEdit for creating and editing Text Documents. For example, Windows OS comes with Notepad and Wordpad for this purpose.

Almost all operating systems come with text editors that allow you to create and edit text files.

However, text editors opening such large files need to be smart for loading and displaying these. Text files can store large amount of data as there is no limitation on the size of contents. All the text contained in such a file is in human-readable format and represented by sequence of characters. A standard text document can be opened in any text editor or word processing application on different operating systems. Paragraphs in a text document are recognized by carriage returns and are used for better arrangement of file contents. TXT extension represents a text document that contains plain text in the form of lines.

Plain text document encoding