TXT → FB2

What is TXT?

TXT is plain text: the file holds characters and nothing else, with no fonts, sizes, colours, images or pagination. Line breaks are its only structure. Most Chinese web novels circulate as TXT precisely because it is small, opens anywhere and is easy to copy and update incrementally. The trade-offs are that it carries no chapter structure, cover or metadata, and that mismatched encodings (UTF-8, GBK, UTF-16) produce mojibake — the two most common TXT problems.

What is FB2?

FB2 (FictionBook 2) is an open XML-based e-book format that is very popular in Russian-speaking regions. Body text, metadata and illustrations all live in one XML file, with images usually embedded as Base64, so a single .fb2 is a complete book that is easy to distribute. It has clean structure and carries chapters and author data natively; the drawbacks are larger size (Base64 inflates images by roughly a third) and less reader support outside Russian-language markets.

What to watch out for when converting TXT to FB2

Extracting from the source

TXT carries no chapter markers — a heading is just a line that looks like one. Before converting, confirm the text has been split correctly (a regex matching chapter patterns), otherwise the whole book becomes one un-navigable block inside EPUB or Kindle.

Writing the target format

FB2 requires structured XML body text, Base64-embedded images and metadata inside <description>. It supports almost no CSS, so it suits text-plus-illustration books rather than layout-heavy titles.

Where the two formats interact

• The source contains no images, so the result has no cover or illustrations. EPUB/Kindle library views then show a blank placeholder — add a cover manually afterwards or the title is unrecognisable on a shelf.
• The source carries no metadata at all (TXT is the classic case) while the target expects a title and author. Converters fall back to the filename, so libraries fill up with "Untitled" or titles still carrying the .txt suffix — fill them in during conversion.
• Chapter headings in the source are ordinary lines while the target demands a real table of contents. Converters try to match patterns such as "Chapter N"; when the match is poor the TOC is garbled or the book has a single chapter. Check that TOC entries match the actual chapter count.
• Any conversion touching TXT must settle encoding: Chinese TXT files are commonly UTF-8, GBK, GB18030 or BIG5, with or without a BOM. Write UTF-8 without BOM for best compatibility, or GBK for legacy devices. A wrong choice shows up as wholesale mojibake, not as an error.
• Line endings need normalising too: CRLF on Windows, LF on Unix, and historically CR on classic Mac. Mixing them makes some readers render everything as a single line — if the whole book collapses into one paragraph, check line endings first.

Post-conversion checklist

1. Convert the first three chapters as a trial and check for lost text, interleaved lines or misplaced blocks before doing the whole book.
2. Check chapter splitting: the TOC entry count should match the real chapter count.
3. Jump to five random spots and search a character name to confirm the text is fully searchable.
4. Fill in title, author and language — a wrong language tag breaks typesetting such as Chinese line breaking.

Converting novels: what is different

Fiction is the most common and the most peculiar kind of e-book: hundreds or thousands of chapters, almost no figures, often nothing but a TXT source, and Chinese sources that frequently carry anti-piracy garbling. These are the points that bite hardest.

• A long novel can run to hundreds or thousands of chapters, so the table of contents decides whether the result is usable. Normalise chapter headings to one recognisable pattern first — say "Chapter N Title" alone on its own line — or the target will miss chapters, merge them, or collapse the whole book into one.
• Chinese web novels in TXT show three very different kinds of garbled text. (1) Encoding mismatch — reading UTF-8 as GBK; fixing the encoding restores it. (2) Anti-piracy substitution — the author deliberately replaced characters; it cannot be recovered, so find another source. (3) Full-width/half-width mixing or missing rare glyphs — a font problem. Diagnose which one you have; do not keep re-encoding the third case.
• Volume markers ("Volume One", "Volume Two") usually degrade to ordinary headings, losing the volume/chapter hierarchy. If that matters, promote volume headings one level in an editor afterwards so they are not siblings of chapter titles.

Tools for converting TXT to FB2

Any of the tools below can handle this direction; pick one by your operating system and how many files you have. Read the previous section first — doing the steps out of order (converting a scanned file before running OCR, for instance) usually means starting over.

Common questions

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