Convert text to HTML with every line and space kept

To convert text to HTML here, select or drop a saved .txt file, press Convert to HTML and download the page. It is one step on our server, graded Exact: nothing is reworded, reflowed or tidied. The page keeps your file's name, so notes.txt comes back as notes.html, and it opens in any web browser and edits in any text editor.

This text to HTML converter works on files, not on typed text: there is no box to paste into. It suits notes, logs, READMEs and drafts you want to read in a browser, share as a web page or put on a site exactly as they were written.

• Your whole text sits in one block of preformatted text (the HTML pre element), so the browser shows it line for line, as typed.
• Line breaks, blank lines, indents and runs of spaces stay where they were, so columns lined up with spaces still line up.
• The words are set in a fixed-width font at 10 pt: Liberation Mono where the reader has it, otherwise the browser's own fixed-width font.
• The browser tab shows your file name as the page title: notes.txt gives a page called notes, and a name such as Résumé draft keeps its accent and space.

The converter shows what you typed and reads no meaning into it. That matters if you expected headings or links:

• HTML tags typed in the file are shown, not used. A bold tag appears as the characters you typed, and a script tag does not run. If your .txt already holds HTML code, rename it to end in .html instead of converting it.
• Markdown is not read. A line starting with # keeps its #, and an asterisk bullet stays an asterisk.
• A web address stays plain text, not a link you can click.
• Long lines do not wrap. A paragraph typed as one long line stays one line: in our test, a line of 525 characters ran far past the edge of a desktop window, and the reader had to scroll sideways.

How your letters come out depends on how the .txt was saved (its encoding). Our server first checks whether the file reads as UTF-8; if it does not, it reads it as Western ANSI (Windows-1252), the encoding older Windows editors used for English and Western European languages. The web page itself is always saved as UTF-8 and says so, so browsers read it the right way.

The result is a whole web page, not a snippet: a head with the title and a short style block, then your text in the body. Double-click it to open it in your browser, attach it to an email, or upload it to a website as it is. To place the text inside a page you already have, open the .html in a text editor and copy the pre element from the body, opening and closing tags included.

A long file stays one page with no page breaks: in our test, 3,000 lines came back as a single .html file of about 140 KB.

Plain text has no headings, bold or pictures to carry over. When your document has them, start from the file it came from: convert Word to HTML brings its text, tables, links and pictures into the page. To print the words or send them as fixed pages, convert text to PDF. For a document you can format, convert text to Word, or convert text to RTF or convert text to ODT for other word processors. Going the other way, convert HTML to text strips a web page back to its words.