Convert FB2 to TXT
FB2 is an XML format built for fiction, with the book's structure and metadata described in tags rather than in styling. Converting to plain text keeps the reading order and the paragraph breaks and drops everything else, which is what you want when the destination is a script, a search index, or a device that reads nothing but text.
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What it does
- Chapter order and paragraph breaks are preserved
- Emphasis, footnotes, images and metadata are dropped
- Output is plain UTF-8 text that any tool can read
How to use FB2 to TXT
- 1
Upload the .fb2
A FictionBook file, plain or zipped. These are common in Russian-language ebook collections and in older reader software.
- 2
The XML becomes running text
The body sections are walked in order and their paragraphs emitted as text, so chapters follow one another as they did in the book.
- 3
Expect no formatting
Italics, small caps and footnote markers have no representation in a text file and are not substituted with anything.
How it works
An FB2 file is an XML document, so it is parsed rather than scraped. The description section holds the metadata and the cover; the body sections hold the book. The converter walks the primary body in order and emits each paragraph as a line of text.
Because the structure is explicit in the markup, chapter order and paragraph boundaries are reliable in a way they are not when extracting text from a rendered format such as PDF, where the reading order has to be inferred from where things sit on the page.
What plain text is good for
Processing. Word counts, readability scores, search indexing, concordances, translation pipelines and anything that wants the words without having to strip markup first. A text file is also the one format that every tool on every platform can open.
It is also the right target for very old or very simple reading devices, some of which accept nothing else.
What plain text cannot hold
Emphasis, headings as headings, footnotes, images, tables and the book's metadata. FB2 records all of these, so this conversion is a genuine narrowing and the FB2 should be kept if the book itself matters rather than just its words.
Footnotes deserve a separate mention
FB2 stores notes in their own body section rather than inline, which is a sensible design for a reader application and an awkward one for a text dump: the notes do not appear where they were referenced. For a heavily annotated book, EPUB or PDF preserves the relationship between a marker and its note in a way a text file cannot.
Encoding
The output is UTF-8. FB2 is widely used for Russian-language books, so this is not a detail: a converter that guessed Latin-1 would produce an unreadable file.
What a FictionBook holds beyond the words
FB2 is an XML format from the Russian ebook world, and it is unusually well-structured for its age: chapters, sections, epigraphs, footnotes, the cover, and a proper metadata block naming the author, translator and original publication.
Converting to plain text keeps the words and the paragraph breaks and discards all of it. Footnotes are the loss worth noticing — in an annotated edition they may carry a substantial part of the value, and text has nowhere to put them.
Use TXT when you want the prose for reading, searching or processing. Convert to EPUB instead if you want the book to remain a book.
Examples
A novel for a text-analysis script
Everything a word-frequency or readability pass needs is present and nothing it would have to strip is. The cover and the metadata are gone, which for this purpose is the desired outcome.
A book with extensive footnotes
FB2 stores footnotes as a distinct body, so they do not interleave with the narrative and the markers referencing them disappear. If the notes are part of what you are reading for, convert to EPUB or PDF instead.
Frequently asked questions
Is any of the book missing from the text file?
The main narrative is complete, but anything FB2 stores outside the primary body may not be. Footnotes and endnotes are held in separate body sections in the format and are not interleaved into the running text, and the cover, illustrations and metadata have no text representation at all. For reading, EPUB keeps all of it; for processing, plain text is usually what you want.
Will the chapters still be separated?
Yes, in reading order and with their paragraph breaks intact, because the section structure of the FB2 is walked in sequence. What you will not get is chapter styling: a heading arrives as a line of text like any other, with no marker distinguishing it. If your script needs to detect chapter boundaries, converting to Markdown or EPUB preserves that distinction.
What encoding is the output?
UTF-8, which matters more than usual here because FB2 files are frequently Russian or otherwise non-Latin. The XML declares its own encoding and the text is converted from it, so Cyrillic, accented Latin and mixed-script books come out correctly. If a downstream tool shows question marks, it is reading the file as something other than UTF-8 rather than the file being wrong.