Can OS X read .txt files ?

[Hobie-wan]

Well Window's Word Pad saves to a .rtf file... so can OS X read this as well?

It defaults to RTF, but the XP version at least will also save to TXT, MSDOS flavored TXT, and Unicode.

[Ziggy]

I love how this thread and the one that I linked in the first post are polar opposites.

Thanks, guys, for making a simple "noob" question painless. And for making Racketboy the great forum that it is!

[dsheinem]

You can read the text file in OS X, but if you want to edit it you'll need to take the file (and your laptop) to an Apple Genius Bar so that a trained TextEdit specialist can do it for you. If you save it to iCloud first for them to access it ahead of time, you can jump ahead in line when you get to the store.

[pierrot]

You can read the text file in OS X, but if you want to edit it you'll need to take the file (and your laptop) to an Apple Genius Bar so that a trained TextEdit specialist can do it for you. If you save it to iCloud first for them to access it ahead of time, you can jump ahead in line when you get to the store.

...At which point, the Genius coven will beam you up to the iCloud in some nebulous cloud in another galaxy, where they will force you to toil away reading iDocs on iAccreting iDust iClouds for all iEternity.

I'd just search the help menu before you do that.

[gtmtnbiker]

As others have mentioned, if you use .rtf or .doc, you'll have no issues because those files are binary formats (values from 0 - 255 per byte).

Normal text files are considered to be ASCII (values from 0 - 127) and each platform has a different line delimiter.

Windows uses \r\n (carriage return, newline)
Unix uses \n (newline)
Mac uses \r (carriage return)

There are editors like Emacs that can handle all formats no matter which platform you're on and save to the correct format.

[scarper]

I'm sure there's plenty of freeware that'll allow you to open any type of text file, word document etc.