TXT to PDF Converter

The .txt extension covers some of the most practical files people keep. Server and app logs, exported chat histories, README files that come with software, song lyrics and chord sheets, transcripts, lists copied out of a spreadsheet: all of them are plain text, and all of them depend on their line breaks. A log entry is one line; a verse is a group of lines; a list only works when each item starts on its own row.

That is the difference from a word processor, which joins short lines into paragraphs. Here the converter does not reflow anything. It prints each line where the file puts it, wraps only the lines that are too long for the page, and keeps the blank lines that separate sections. What you see in Notepad or TextEdit is what you get on paper.

People usually need the PDF for one of three reasons: to hand a record to someone else, such as a log attached to a support ticket or a chat export for a dispute; to print it; or to keep it in a format that opens on any device without the app that made it.

This page starts on Letter, the 8.5 × 11 inch sheet used in the United States and Canada, with narrow margins of 12.7 mm on each side. Narrow margins matter for text files more than for documents: lines in logs and chat exports are often long, and every millimeter of width means fewer lines broken in two.

If you print on A4, the standard in most other countries, change Page size before converting. A4 is a little narrower and taller than Letter, so the page holds slightly fewer characters per line and slightly more lines. The table further down lists the A sizes for comparison.

The settings apply to every file in the batch, so a folder of logs from one system comes out with identical pages. That consistency helps when the PDFs are compared side by side or attached to the same report, and it means you set the page once rather than for each file.

A5 is worth knowing about for short texts. A poem, a recipe or a set of instructions printed on A5 is half an A4 sheet, easy to fold into a card or pin to a board. A3 is rarely needed for text, but it gives very long log lines room to stay on one line when you print a wide report.

Orientation helps too. Switching Orientation to landscape gives a wide page where log lines and tab-separated columns wrap far less, at the cost of fewer lines per page.

For very large logs, the quickest fix is often to trim the file before converting. Open it in an editor, keep the hours or the lines that matter, save a copy and convert that. A 50-page PDF of the relevant entries is far easier for a support team to read than thousands of pages of everything.

Plain text has no fonts or styles, but it does have an encoding: the rule that turns bytes into letters. Almost every current editor saves in UTF-8, which covers every script, and those files convert without any setting. Older files from Windows programs may use a regional encoding instead; if accented letters come out as odd symbols, re-save the file as UTF-8 and convert it again.

Files that use Markdown symbols, such as hash signs before headings, are printed with those symbols on this page. If you would rather have them turned into real headings and lists, use Text to PDF with a .md file. For Word, Excel and slide files, the Convert to PDF tool works the same way.