My Drupal Blog

Text documents with the extension .txt are often found in folders downloaded from drupal.org, such as modules, themes, and project releases.

As an example, lets look at the folder for Drupal 5.1.

It contains a file called install.txt which, logically, I might want to read before installing. However, when I open the file by double-clicking on it, I just get a pretty illegible chunk of text.

All of the words are there, but everything is lumped together with no formatting, and there seem to be little rectangular boxes all over the place. So what do I do?

Well, I could just trawl through the file and make the best of it, but there is a far better solution - open it using Word.

There are two ways you can do this. If you already have the .txt file open just do the following:

• select all of the text by right-clicking and then choosing 'Select all'
• right-click again and choose 'Copy'
• now open up Word for Windows and create a new file
• richt-click on the new file and choose 'Paste'
• that's it!

If the file isn't open just:

• right-click on it
• go down to 'Open With...' and choose Microsoft Word
• if Word asks you what conversion you'd like to use just stick with the Windows default
• that's it!

All of the text is now easily readable, and you've got no more need to try and decipher those crazy .txt files.

P.S. - For those who are interested, the little rectangular boxes that were all over the place in the .txt file determine the line breaks. One box means the line just breaks, two boxes means the line breaks and then leaves a gap, and so on.