DOCX → TXT
Converting a novel from Word (.docx) to Plain text (.txt) is a routine step in practice — a TXT file is plain text, opens in far more software, and is smaller. Going from Word to Plain text does raise extra questions worth thinking about: you lose every illustration, cover and diagram; metadata such as title, author and language. Below we explain in detail how Word becomes Plain text and what to watch out for, and the page ends with a converter that does the job right in your browser — nothing is uploaded, the file never leaves your machine.
What is DOCX?
A .docx is really a ZIP of Office Open XML: the body text lives in word/document.xml, while styles, comments and tracked changes sit in their own parts. That preserves far more than Markdown can — pagination, headers and footers, footnotes, comments, revision history, precise type sizes and indents. The cost is structural complexity and software dependence: rendering differs between Word versions and third-party readers, and the content is not plain text, so you cannot inspect it directly. As a conversion source it carries the most information; as a final reading format its experience depends on the software that opens it. Read the DOCX format guide
| Extensions | .docx |
|---|---|
| Typical use | Authoring and layout source files; the most information-rich intermediate before converting to EPUB or TXT. |
What is TXT?
TXT is plain text: nothing but characters and line breaks, with no presentation information at all. That makes it the smallest and most compatible option — from the most basic feature phone to any operating system, there is almost no software that cannot open it. Most Chinese web novels circulate as TXT, and it is the easiest format to copy, search, batch-process and convert further. The cost is that it stores no images, colours, tables or table of contents, and there is nowhere to keep the title and author, so it behaves more like a clean body of text than a complete book. Read the TXT format guide
| Extensions | .txt |
|---|---|
| Typical use | Chinese web novels, logs, and any text-only content that needs maximum compatibility. |
How to convert DOCX to TXT
A .docx is a ZIP of Office Open XML with content in word/document.xml. Heading styles decide whether chapters survive: if the author used manually-bolded large text instead of Heading 1, the resulting EPUB has no table of contents.
Because TXT stores characters only, every font, size, colour, table, footnote and hyperlink is gone, and headings degrade to ordinary lines. You must also choose an encoding (UTF-8 for Chinese, GBK if targeting older devices).
Illustrations, covers and diagrams inside DOCX files are images, and the TXT format stores none, so they are all lost. A comic DOCX, for example, keeps everything in pictures — converting it to TXT throws away most of the content.
Metadata in the DOCX source — title, author, publisher, language, table of contents, cover — has nowhere to live in the target, so converting to TXT loses all of it.
Flattening a structured archive into one text file requires ordering chapters by the manifest (spine), not by ZIP entry name. This is the easiest mistake to make and the hardest to notice: the file opens fine, but the chapters are shuffled.
Convert DOCX to TXT
DOCX → TXT
The conversion runs entirely in your browser — your file is never uploaded.
A novel reader that syncs your progress across every platform
Tide Reader opens TXT and EPUB, detects chapters on import, lays the text out the way you like it, and syncs your reading position across Windows, macOS, iOS and Android. Drop the converted file in and start reading.
Download Tide ReaderTXT and EPUB; local-first reading, with optional cloud sync and WebDAV.