Text files are intended for storing and processing text information in electronic form. There are many different types of text formats, which differ in the methods of text encoding, processing capabilities, and compatibility with various text editors.
Txt format
This is the oldest text format, analogs of the modern notebook were still on the first PCs. It is the most versatile. Txt documents are opened with text editors that run on any operating system.
The format is very simple and contains nothing but text. Formatting is not supported - only paragraphs, indentation, and capital letters are retained. Therefore, txt files are small. The format is resistant to damage. If part of the file is damaged, you can recover or process the rest of the document.
Rtf format
Specially developed by programmers from Microsoft and Adobe for the exchange of files between users. Can be opened and processed on any platform. Supported by many applications. Currently, rtf is introduced in Windows as a Clipboard format, which makes it possible to exchange data between different applications.
Document-rtf supports complex formatting. In addition to text, it can contain various figures, tables, inserts and footnotes. It can use several types of fonts. The format is resistant to file corruption. Since rtf does not use macros, it is considered safer than the doc format.
Doc format
There was a time when the doc format was used for simple and unformatted text documents, and Microsoft Word was a regular text editor. However, in the early 1990s, the situation began to change. Both the app and the format were constantly updated. Moreover, each new version was more and more different from the previous one.
Today doc provides tremendous possibilities for processing text and inserting various images, diagrams, tables, links into a document. May include scripts and macros. But you need to remember that the format is closed, many documents in this format are displayed correctly only in the MS Word program itself.
In addition, developers are not concerned with the backward compatibility of versions of their application. Files created in new MS Word cannot be opened in previous versions of the program without installing plugins. The main difference between the doc format and txt and rtf is their binary nature, which makes them unreadable in simple text editors.
Docx format
It was first used in MS Word 2007. Its main difference from the doc format is the use of zip compression to reduce the file size. It is a data archive containing, in addition to XML text, images, text styles, formatting, and other data. Moreover, text files and graphics are stored in separate documents.
To see the contents of a docx file, you can change its extension to zip and open it in any archiver. To open a docx in earlier versions of Word, you must download and install the "Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint File Formats"
ODT / ODF (Open Document Format)
On December 21, 2010 by the Federal Agency for Technical Regulation and Metrology of Russia the open format for office documents Open Document (ODF) was registered as a state standard.
ODT / ODF (Open Document Format), developed by the OASIS community, based on HTML. It is an open format that can be used without restrictions and is an alternative to the Microsoft formats.
