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Text

Plain-text and lightweight markup formats like TXT, Markdown, CSV and JSON, explained for everyday and developer use.

Format details

What is Text?

The text family on Konvert covers the human-readable formats that live everywhere from notes apps to spreadsheets to server configs: TXT, Markdown, CSV, TSV, JSON and YAML. This hub explains how these formats differ in structure, how they encode data and where they overlap. Dedicated in-browser conversion tools for text are future; today the emphasis is on choosing the right format and understanding what conversions between them actually mean. Live Konvert tools for this family are not available yet.

Specifications

Typical file size
Very small compared to media files: a typical Markdown note is a few kilobytes, a mid-sized CSV or JSON export a few megabytes, and even large log files usually fit comfortably in-browser.
Quality
Text quality is less about pixels and more about fidelity: whether characters, line endings, encodings, quoting and structure survive a conversion. UTF-8 is the modern default; older or Windows-generated files may still use UTF-16 or code pages that need explicit handling. For structured text like CSV or JSON, quality means preserving values, types and nesting exactly.
Transparency support
Varies — Not applicable. Transparency is a graphical property and has no meaning for text formats.
Animation support
Varies — Not applicable. Text formats represent static content.
Compression type
Uncompressed by default. Text compresses extremely well with generic algorithms (gzip, zstd, brotli) when needed for transport or storage.
Browser support
Universally supported. Any browser can read, display and process text formats, and modern JavaScript APIs handle UTF-8 natively.
Compatibility
Plain text is arguably the most portable format in computing. TXT and Markdown are readable in any editor; CSV opens in every spreadsheet; JSON and YAML are the lingua franca of APIs and configuration.

Advantages

  • Human-readable and diff-friendly, which makes review and version control easy.
  • Extremely small files that compress well when needed.
  • No proprietary lock-in — any editor on any platform can open them.
  • Rich ecosystem: nearly every language and tool has parsers and formatters.
  • Perfect for automation, scripting and data interchange.

Disadvantages

  • No built-in formatting for print or design work.
  • Encoding issues (UTF-8 vs UTF-16, BOMs, line endings) can trip up naive tools.
  • CSV is deceptively fragile: quoting, escaping and delimiter choices vary widely.
  • Konvert.in's dedicated text conversion tools are still being built out.
  • Very large text files may need streaming approaches rather than loading whole into memory.

Common uses

  • Writing documentation and notes in Markdown.
  • Exporting and importing spreadsheet data as CSV or TSV.
  • Storing API payloads and configuration in JSON or YAML.
  • Sharing logs, scripts and code snippets as plain TXT.
  • Feeding data into scripts, spreadsheets and databases.

Common conversions

  • CSV ↔ TSV
  • CSV ↔ JSON
  • Markdown → HTML for previews
  • JSON ↔ YAML for config files
  • Encoding conversions such as UTF-16 → UTF-8

Compression tips

  • Save text as UTF-8 without a BOM unless a specific tool requires one.
  • For CSV, quote fields containing commas, quotes or line breaks and be explicit about the delimiter.
  • Prefer JSON for anything with nested structure; keep CSV for flat, tabular data.
  • For large logs, gzip or zstd on transport rather than trying to trim the content.
  • Normalise line endings (LF vs CRLF) when moving files between operating systems.

Frequently asked questions