Plain Text Resume: Six Headings, 72 Characters

Every applicant tracking system, every public employment portal and every paste-into-a-box application form reduces your resume to characters in named fields. Whatever the parser guesses is what gets scored. You are already submitting plain text; the only open question is whether you wrote it or a converter did.

Direct Answer: A plain text resume is your resume saved as .txt and built as six ALL-CAPS headings in one 72-character column: CONTACT, SUMMARY, SKILLS, EXPERIENCE, EDUCATION, CERTIFICATIONS & LANGUAGES. Hyphen bullets, one blank line between blocks, saved as UTF-8. ResuFit writes the field content that structure carries.

What you’ll take away:

• Why your designed document turns into plain text before anyone scores it
• The six ALL-CAPS headings in one 72-character column recipe, with a full worked example
• Where the 72 comes from (IETF RFC 5322, 2008) and why 78 is the outer limit
• When .txt is a sanctioned federal upload rather than a workaround
• How to keep accented characters intact instead of deleting them

What is a plain text resume?

A plain text resume is a .txt file that contains characters and nothing else. No fonts, no tables, no columns, no logos, no header or footer. What survives that reduction is sequence and labelling, which is exactly what a parser reads.

That constraint is the whole design brief. Strip a resume of everything a machine cannot store, and the structure left standing is six ALL-CAPS headings in one 72-character column.

Why does your resume already become plain text?

Because the system on the other end converts it. University of Pennsylvania Career Services (2026) warns that not all applicant tracking systems can read decorative formatting such as tables, shapes, graphics and images, and adds that in some employer’s job systems you may need to copy & paste your resume into an online application form. That paste is routine rather than exceptional, and it is the point where your layout stops existing.

Column count is where that conversion most often breaks. The University of Scranton Center for Career Development (2026) puts it flatly: 1 column is recommended, as applicant tracking systems (ATS) can’t properly analyze a 2 column format. A sidebar is usually a table, and a table is where a parser starts interleaving your job titles with your hobbies.

A designed CV shows a recruiter your layout. A plain text CV shows the parser your fields.

How much any individual system mangles depends on the system. Vendors differ, versions differ, and the same file can parse cleanly in one portal and badly in the next. Test a parsed copy of your own document instead of trusting a rule of thumb.

What does the six-heading plain text resume look like?

Six headings, one column, hyphen bullets, a blank line between blocks. Here is the full shape, written as six ALL-CAPS headings in one 72-character column:

JANE OKONKWO

CONTACT
jane.okonkwo@example.com | +44 7700 900123 | Manchester, UK
linkedin.com/in/janeokonkwo

SUMMARY
Project coordinator, six years, running client campaigns end
to end in regulated financial services.

SKILLS
- Project delivery: scoping, RAID logs, stage gates
- Data and reporting: SQL, Looker Studio, attribution models
- Stakeholder communication: steering groups, board packs

EXPERIENCE
Project Coordinator, RiverMedia, Manchester
2022-03 to 2026-06
- Ran 14 client campaigns end to end, all inside budget
- Rebuilt monthly reporting, prep cut from 2 days to 3 hours

Marketing Assistant, Kreativo, Leeds
2019-09 to 2022-02
- Owned attribution across 4 paid channels

EDUCATION
BA Communications, University of Leeds, 2019

CERTIFICATIONS & LANGUAGES
- PRINCE2 Practitioner, 2024
- English (native), French (B2)

Six headings is the useful number because it maps onto the fields nearly every intake form asks for. ALL-CAPS is the only emphasis a .txt file has, so it carries the whole job of marking a section boundary.

Once the structure is fixed, the remaining work is wording, and that is where applications are won or lost. ResuFit rewrites your resume for the job, in the posting’s own terms, so the SKILLS and EXPERIENCE blocks carry the phrases an employer screens on. Build your plain text version free.

How long should each line be?

Wrap at 72 characters. The number comes from IETF RFC 5322 §2.1.1 (P. Resnick, ed., 2008), the internet message format standard, which specifies that each line of characters MUST be no more than 998 characters, and SHOULD be no more than 78 characters, excluding the CRLF. The stated reason is blunt: display implementations may truncate, or disastrously wrap, anything longer.

Seventy-two sits inside the 78 recommendation with room to spare. That headroom matters when a recruiter forwards your resume and the mail client indents every line with a quote marker, which is exactly the case RFC 5322 was written for.

Long lines are the single most common defect in a hand-made .txt resume. A 110-character bullet looks fine in your editor and arrives in someone’s inbox broken across two ragged lines with the second half orphaned.

When is a .txt resume an accepted upload?

When the employer’s system accepts one, and the federal track is the clearest case. The USAJOBS Help Center (U.S. Office of Personnel Management, 2026) lists TXT among the accepted resume upload formats, alongside PDF, RTF, ODT, DOC and DOCX, with a 5 MB limit, and states that PDF portfolio files are not accepted. Plain text is a sanctioned submission format there, named by the agency that runs the portal.

The length rules push the same way. OPM’s agency guidance on the two-page limit (2025) caps federal resumes at two pages under the Merit Hiring Plan and repeats the accepted-format list along with 0.5-inch margins and 10-point body text. When you are length-capped, a dense single column stops being a compromise and starts being an advantage: no sidebar, no whitespace tax, no decorative rule eating a line.

Beyond the federal track, three moments call for the file:

• Any online form with a resume box. Paste, then read what landed in the box.
• Email body submissions, where the recruiter asked for text and not an attachment.
• A parse check before you send anything else. Save a copy as .txt, reopen it, and see which of your headings and dates survived. It is a rough proxy rather than a guarantee, since each system parses differently.

Our guide to functional resume templates in Word uses that same check on a skills-first layout.

Does a plain text resume help in a UK name-blind sift?

It helps for a different reason than people expect. UK public-sector recruitment often scores field content rather than documents. The UK Department for Business and Trade (2022) describes its own process this way: at DBT, we also use blind recruitment at sift stage, which means personal details like your name and age are not visible to the panel, so the focus stays on skills and experience.

When the panel sees fields instead of your document, the quality of those fields is the entire application. A .txt version forces you to write them yourself, in your own words, rather than letting a converter decide which line was a job title.

Which characters survive, and how should you save the file?

Save as UTF-8 and keep your accents. The W3C (Internationalization Glossary, 2026) describes UTF-8 as the dominant Unicode encoding form on the web and defines mojibake, the garbled text people blame on accented letters, as what appears when bytes are read with the wrong character encoding. The encoding is the fault line, so stripping the accent fixes nothing and turns a correct name into a wrong one. If your name carries a ü, an é, an ñ or a ç, it belongs in the file exactly as it is spelled.

Three practical rules:

• Encoding: save as UTF-8, and check it in your editor’s save dialog rather than assuming.
• Bullets: hyphens only. Decorative glyphs and box-drawing characters are noise to a parser.
• Separators: a blank line between blocks. Rules made of dashes add nothing a blank line does not.

Designed CV or plain text: which one gets scored?

In any automated intake, the plain text version is the one that gets scored, because it leaves the parser nothing to guess.

Criterion	Designed CV (PDF or DOCX)	Plain text .txt
What you control	Fonts, colour, columns	Field order and wording
What the parser stores	Whatever it guesses from the layout	What you typed
Columns	Often two, with a sidebar	Always one
Line length	Reflows on every screen	Fixed at 72 characters
Bullets	Decorative glyphs	Hyphens
Accented characters	Depend on the embedded font	Preserved when saved as UTF-8
Pasted into a web form	Collapses	Arrives intact
Accepted on USAJOBS	Yes (PDF, DOC, DOCX, RTF, ODT)	Yes (TXT)
Best for	Sending to a named human	Every automated intake

Keep both. The designed version is for the person who asked for a PDF, and our minimalist resume template guide covers how to design one that degrades gracefully. If you are typesetting an academic CV instead, the LaTeX CV guide is the right route, and the InDesign resume guide shows what a fully designed document costs you at the parsing stage.

The short version

Plain text is the format your resume already becomes, somewhere between the upload button and the recruiter’s screen. Write that version yourself: six ALL-CAPS headings in one 72-character column, hyphen bullets, a blank line between blocks, saved as UTF-8.