PDF to RTF

Convert your PDF files to RTF, right here in your browser.

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Frequently asked questions

What is actually inside a RTF file?

A .rtf file is plain text sprinkled with backslash control words that carry the formatting, which is why it can be opened by almost any editor written since the eighties.

Are my files uploaded to a server?

No. Your PDF is read and the RTF file is built entirely inside your browser, so nothing ever leaves your device.

Can I convert several files at once?

Yes. Add as many PDF files as you like and download the results one by one, or all together as a ZIP archive.

Will the result look exactly like the original PDF?

The text, headings and table columns are recovered and rebuilt as a RTF file. This is a content-faithful conversion rather than a copy of the original page design, so fonts, spacing and images are not carried over.

What happens with a scanned PDF?

A scanned page is a picture of text rather than text itself, so there is nothing to extract from it. Convert it to an image format instead, or run it through OCR first.

Is there a file size or file count limit?

No. Everything runs on your own device, so the only practical limit is how much memory your browser has available.

Do I need to install anything?

No. There is nothing to install and no account to create — the converter runs in any modern browser, on desktop and mobile alike.

Why would I want RTF rather than Word?

Almost always because something has asked for it. Legal case management systems, medical records software and older document platforms often accept RTF and little else. If you have a choice, DOCX preserves more — real heading styles that drive Word's navigation pane and table of contents, which RTF does not carry in the same way.

Will accented characters and symbols be correct?

Yes. RTF is a 7-bit ASCII format, so anything above that range must be written as a numeric escape rather than as itself, and every such character is converted properly. Braces and backslashes in your text are escaped too — an unescaped brace terminates a group early and corrupts the rest of the document, which is the classic failure of hand-rolled RTF writers.

Are headings preserved?

As visible emphasis: lines detected as headings by their relative type size are written larger and bold, so the document keeps its hierarchy on the page. What you do not get is named heading styles of the kind DOCX carries, which is a limitation of RTF rather than of the conversion.

Do images come through?

No. RTF can embed images as hex-encoded data, but a PDF's images are separate objects from its text layer and are not extracted here. Extract PDF images pulls them out at full resolution if you need them.

What opens an RTF file?

Essentially everything — Word, WordPad, LibreOffice, TextEdit, Google Docs on import, and the older systems that requested it. That universality is the entire reason the format still exists.

My RTF is empty.

The PDF has no text layer; it is a scan. Try selecting a sentence in a viewer — if nothing highlights, the file needs OCR before any converter can extract anything.

Rich Text Format exists to be read by things that read nothing else. Microsoft designed it in 1987 as an interchange format, encoding an entire formatted document as plain ASCII control words inside nested braces — no binary structures, no ZIP container, nothing that requires a modern parser.

That is still why you would want one. Legal case management systems, medical records software, older document management platforms and a long tail of line-of-business applications accept RTF and reject almost everything else. If something has told you it wants RTF, this is the conversion.

The document is rebuilt from the PDF the same way as for any other target — glyph positions grouped into lines, headings identified by relative type size — and then written as RTF, which brings one specific technical demand described below.

How to convert PDF to RTF

Add your PDF
Drop it in or choose it. It is read in your browser and never uploaded.
Convert
Text is extracted with coordinates and rebuilt into lines, then written as RTF control words with everything above ASCII properly escaped.
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The .rtf opens in Word, WordPad, LibreOffice, TextEdit and the older systems that asked for it in the first place.

Seven-bit ASCII, and why escaping matters

RTF predates Unicode. The format is fundamentally 7-bit ASCII: braces and backslashes are syntax, and any character above the ASCII range has to be written as a numeric escape — `\u233` for é, and so on — rather than as itself.

Getting this wrong is the classic way to produce a corrupt RTF. An unescaped brace inside your text terminates a group early and the rest of the document collapses into nonsense; an unescaped backslash is read as the start of a control word. A curly quote or an accented letter written literally produces a mis-decoded character at best.

So every brace and backslash is escaped, and every character outside ASCII is converted to its numeric form. This is why a converted document containing €, é, — or a curly apostrophe opens correctly rather than showing the mangled substitutes that badly written RTF produces.

What comes across

The document text: In reading order, with lines rebuilt from glyph baselines.
Paragraph breaks: Written as proper RTF paragraph control words, so the document has real paragraphs in whatever opens it.
Heading emphasis: Lines detected as headings by their relative size are set larger and bold, so the document keeps visible hierarchy.
Non-ASCII characters: Escaped numerically and therefore preserved — accents, currency symbols, dashes and typographic quotes all survive.
Page design: Not reproduced. Columns, exact fonts, colours and page breaks are not carried across.
Images and tables: Not included. RTF can embed images as hex-encoded data, but a PDF's images are separate objects and are not extracted here; tables come through as text.

When to choose something else

RTF is the right answer when a system has specifically asked for it. It is rarely the right answer otherwise.

For anyone working in Word, DOCX preserves more: real heading styles that drive the navigation pane and automatic tables of contents, which RTF's control-word stream does not carry in the same usable form.

For LibreOffice, ODT is the better target for the same reason. For a document going onto the web or being read on a phone, HTML reflows and RTF does not. And for text that is going into a script or a search, plain text is simpler than RTF's braces.

The one thing RTF does better than any of them is open in old software, which is exactly the case it was invented for.

About the RTF format

.rtf is the rich-text format Microsoft introduced in 1987. It is published as an open specification under the name RTF 1.9.1, so a file can be read without the program that wrote it.

A .rtf file is plain text sprinkled with backslash control words that carry the formatting, which is why it can be opened by almost any editor written since the eighties.

Files like this usually come out of WordPad, TextEdit, Microsoft Word, and LibreOffice Writer.

What comes through

body text
heading levels
reading order

What does not

embedded images
table rows and columns
the exact page design
embedded fonts

Worth knowing

A scanned PDF is a picture of a page, not text, so there is nothing for this tool to extract — the result will be empty. That is the honest outcome, not a failure.
This conversion is content-faithful, not pixel-faithful: text, heading levels and table columns survive, the original page design does not.

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