Sygic POI (.txt)

Sygic POI (.txt) is a plain, tab-separated points-of-interest list for Sygic's GPS navigation apps, in two variants: a read-only ASCII flavor and a read/write Unicode flavor.

At a glance

Extension .txt
Encoding text
By Sygic a.s.

History

Sygic a.s. is a Slovak company based in Bratislava, founded in 2004 by Michal Štencl, Martin Kališ and Peter Pecho. In 2009 it became the first company to offer GPS navigation for iPhone; Eurowag acquired a 70% stake in 2019 and became sole owner in 2024. No separate publication date is documented for this .txt exchange format itself.

Where it is used

A user's own custom points of interest are not loaded straight into the Sygic app from this .txt file: third-party POI-converter tools turn it (or a .csv sibling) into Sygic's own .upi/.rupi POI-database format, which is what the app's built-in custom-POI import wizard actually reads, alongside a same-named .bmp icon file.

Structure

A tab-separated text file, one point per line — longitude, latitude, name and an optional phone number, in that order, preceded by ";"-prefixed comment lines describing the format. The Unicode variant is UTF-16LE with a byte-order mark and an extra "; unicode" marker line; the ASCII variant is plain-text without either.

How widespread

Sygic remains a currently maintained, widely used GPS navigation app (majority- and now wholly owned by Eurowag since 2019/2024); its own native custom-POI formats are .upi/.rupi, with this plain-text format serving as an interchange step for third-party POI-converter tools rather than something the app reads directly.

RouteConverter support

Reads Sygic POI ASCII, Sygic POI Unicode
Writes Sygic POI Unicode

RouteConverter reads and writes the Unicode variant but only reads the ASCII variant — its write path is intentionally disabled and throws if invoked.

Specifications and documentation