TXTtoPDF
Convert TXT to PDF
Up to 3 files at once, 100 with Pro. Mixed formats are fine.
A text file is as plain as a file gets: characters, and nothing else. Turning it into a PDF gives it pages, a typeface and margins — and makes it something you can submit.
Plain text is the format that outlives everything. No version, no proprietary reader, no formatting to break — it will still open in fifty years. That reliability is also its problem the moment a person on the other end expects a document: submission systems ask for PDF, printers want defined pages, and a `.txt` attachment looks like a fragment of something rather than a finished thing.
This conversion gives the text what it is missing. The content is laid out on standard pages with a readable typeface and sensible margins, paragraph breaks and blank lines intact, and the result is a document you can attach without explanation. For notes, a manuscript, a letter, an exported transcript or anything else that is essentially prose, it is exactly right and there is nothing more to think about.
Two things go wrong often enough to be worth naming, and both are properties of plain text rather than faults in the conversion.
The first is encoding. A text file does not record which encoding it uses — that information simply is not in the file — so any program opening one has to guess. Guess wrong and every accented character comes out as nonsense: a file saved on Windows in the older Western encoding, read as UTF-8, turns é into two meaningless symbols. If your output has garbled accents, umlauts or quotation marks, that is what happened. The permanent fix is to open the original in any editor and re-save it as UTF-8, which is what everything modern expects.
The second is line length. A text file has no page width, and a PDF page does. Lines that run past the margin wrap onto the next line, which is correct for prose and unhelpful for anything structured. A server log, a code listing or a fixed-width report relies on each record occupying one line, and wrapping destroys that at a glance. The text is set in a proportional typeface as well, so anything aligned with spaces — an ASCII table, columns of figures — will not line up. If your file is structured rather than written, this is the wrong destination for it.
For everything else, this is about as safe as a conversion gets. Nothing is compressed, nothing is interpreted, and there is no formatting to lose because there was none to begin with. What goes in as characters comes out as the same characters, on pages.
How to convert
- Drop your TXT file onto this page, or click to choose one.
- It is laid out on standard pages with readable margins.
- Download the PDF. Your original is deleted as soon as the job finishes.
What to expect
- Quality
- The result is a close reconstruction rather than an exact copy. Check it before relying on it.
- Where it runs
- This conversion is not available yet. The page describes what it will do once the engine ships.
- What can be lost
- Layout is reproduced with metric-compatible substitute fonts. Macros, comments and tracked changes are not carried over.
Questions
- Are my TXT files uploaded anywhere?
- Yes — this conversion needs software that cannot run in a browser, so the file is uploaded over an encrypted connection. It is deleted as soon as the job finishes, and the result is removed after 60 minutes.
- Why are my accented characters wrong?
- Almost always an encoding mismatch. A text file does not record which encoding it uses, so it has to be guessed, and a file saved as Windows-1252 read as UTF-8 turns accents and umlauts into nonsense. Re-saving the original as UTF-8 in any editor fixes it permanently.
- What happens to very long lines?
- They wrap at the page margin. A text file has no page width, so a 400-character line becomes several lines in the PDF. That is right for prose and wrong for a log or code, where the wrapping makes the structure hard to follow.
- Is it a monospaced font?
- No, the text is set in a proportional face. If your file relies on spaces for alignment — an ASCII table, a code listing, a fixed-width report — the columns will not line up. Those belong in something that preserves the spacing.
- Can I choose the page size or margins?
- Not here. The output is a standard page with sensible margins. For control over the layout, open the file in a word processor and export from there.
- Does it keep line breaks and blank lines?
- Yes. Paragraph breaks and blank lines are preserved as they appear in the file.