ODT to TXT

The ODT to TXT converter turns a .odt file into plain text: you upload a document, and its text content appears in the field below. From there you copy the text with the "Copy" button or save it to a .txt file with the "Download .txt" button. The "Between paragraphs" setting lets you choose what separates paragraphs, a line break or an empty line.

What goes into the text and what stays in the document

The result contains the contents of the paragraphs in the same order as in the document. Headings become separate paragraphs, but without level marks, so the finished text no longer shows what was a heading and what was a regular paragraph. List items also become separate paragraphs, without bullets or numbers.

Spaces and tabs inside a paragraph stay as they are. A line break inside a paragraph becomes a line break in the text. Table cells turn into separate paragraphs, and the table structure is lost: columns and rows can no longer be told apart in the text. If you need the actual table rather than a set of lines, check it in the source document, not in the converted text.

Everything else stays out of the text. Bold, italics, color, and font size are dropped; images, text boxes, and footnote text remain only in the document. There is no way to recover them from the resulting text.

Encoding and line endings

The "File encoding" setting offers three options: UTF-8, UTF-8 with a BOM mark, and Windows-1251. UTF-8 works for most cases. Choose Windows-1251 for older programs that cannot read UTF-8; a character missing from that encoding is replaced with a question mark. Add the BOM mark when the receiving program requires it to recognize the file as UTF-8.

The "Line endings" setting affects only the downloaded file and offers a Windows option or a Linux and macOS option. Pick Windows if the file is going into a Windows program, and Linux for macOS. The field on the page always shows text with Linux line endings, so this setting makes no visible difference on screen.

For the reverse task of building an ODT document from text, there is the TXT to ODT converter. Text from a PDF is extracted page by page with PDF to TXT.