How it works
The RTF to Text converter strips Rich Text Format (.rtf) markup and outputs clean plain text โ removing all formatting codes, color tags, font specifications, and metadata to produce just the readable content. Use it to extract the text from RTF files received from legacy systems, legal software, or older word processors.
RTF (Rich Text Format) was the universal word processor interchange format before .docx. It is still generated by many legal practice management systems, older court filing software, legacy CRM platforms, and medical dictation systems. RTF files are unreadable in their raw form (filled with tf1ansiansicpg1252cocoartf markers) โ this tool extracts the human-readable content.
How to use it: upload an .rtf file or paste raw RTF code into the input. The tool strips all RTF control words and groups, decodes Unicode and ANSI escape sequences, and outputs the plain text content. Download as .txt or copy to clipboard.
Formatting preservation (optional): toggle Preserve Headings to maintain line breaks at heading boundaries. Toggle Preserve Tables to render tables as tab-separated text (useful for data import). Full formatting conversion to Markdown or HTML is available with the mode switch.
Encoding: RTF files may use ANSI code pages (Windows-1252, Windows-1250 for Eastern European languages) or Unicode. The converter handles all standard RTF code page specifications and outputs UTF-8 plain text.
Privacy: RTF parsing runs in the browser.
Frequently Asked Questions
- RTF control words are formatting instructions embedded in the file text (e.g., \b for bold, \fs24 for 12pt font size, \par for paragraph break). They are part of the RTF format specification and appear verbatim if you open an .rtf in a plain text editor. This tool strips all control words and outputs only the readable content.
- Yes. Paragraph marks (\par) in the RTF are converted to double newlines (blank line between paragraphs). Line breaks within paragraphs (\line) are converted to single newlines. The output preserves the paragraph flow of the original document.
- Yes. Legal RTF (from software like Westlaw, LexisNexis) and medical dictation RTF (Dragon, Nuance) follow the RTF 1.9 specification which this tool fully supports. Character encoding, Unicode escapes, and symbol fonts are handled correctly.
- RTF tables are converted to tab-separated text in plain text mode (each cell separated by a tab, each row on a new line) or to Markdown table syntax in Markdown mode (| col | col | with separator rows). The visual alignment is preserved as column structure.