RTF to PDF

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

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Add a RTF file to convert.

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 RTF file is read and the PDF is built entirely inside your browser, so nothing ever leaves your device.

Can I convert several files at once?

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

Will the layout look exactly like the original?

The text, headings, lists and tables carry over and are laid out onto clean A4 pages. This is a content-faithful conversion rather than a pixel-perfect copy of the original formatting.

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 doesn't my RTF keep its bold and italic formatting?

Because RTF expresses formatting as control words interleaved with the text, and this converter reads the text and passes over the formatting. You get the document's words and paragraph structure laid out cleanly, not a reproduction of its appearance. For a document where the formatting is the content, exporting .docx from the original application preserves more.

Do accented characters and symbols convert correctly?

Yes. RTF stores anything outside plain ASCII as a numeric escape followed by a fallback character for old readers. Both are handled — the escape is decoded to the real character and the redundant fallback is dropped — so é arrives as é rather than as é plus a stray letter, which is the classic symptom of a parser that only handles half of it.

Will the font and colour tables appear in my PDF?

No. Those groups are recognised by name and skipped in full, along with stylesheets, document metadata, embedded pictures and list tables. That skipping is most of what makes the output readable — without it a PDF would open with a list of typeface names before reaching a single word of your document.

What happens to images in an RTF?

They are left out. RTF embeds pictures as hex-encoded data inside picture groups, and those groups are skipped wholesale — necessarily, since anything else would put pages of hexadecimal into your document.

Should I use RTF or DOCX?

DOCX, if the source application offers it. RTF's virtue is compatibility with very old software, but it is a control-word stream rather than a structured document, so heading levels and other structure that DOCX states explicitly are not recoverable in the same way. If you are choosing an export format with a PDF as the destination, DOCX gives a better result.

Is my file uploaded?

No. The RTF is parsed inside your browser tab and the PDF is written on your device — which matters, since RTF is common in legal and medical systems where the documents are confidential by default.

Rich Text Format is Microsoft's 1987 answer to the problem of moving a formatted document between programs that share nothing else. Its trick was to encode everything — the text, the fonts, the colours, the tables — as plain ASCII control words inside nested braces, so an RTF file survives being emailed, pasted into a terminal or stored in a database field in a way a binary format does not.

That design is why RTF is still around: WordPad wrote it, legal and medical systems export it, and it is often what you get when an old application offers you "rich text". It is also why parsing one is a particular kind of work. A .rtf is mostly *not* your document — it opens with a font table, a colour table and a stylesheet, and your actual words are somewhere after all of that.

This converter walks the brace structure, skips the groups that are known not to be document text, decodes the escapes that carry non-ASCII characters, and lays out what remains.

How to convert RTF to PDF

Add your .rtf files
Drop them in or choose them. Each becomes its own PDF.
Convert
The control-word structure is parsed: non-text destinations are skipped wholesale, paragraph and line breaks become real breaks, tabs are kept, and Unicode escapes are decoded back into characters.
Download
Save the PDF. Nothing left your device.

Why an RTF file is mostly not your document

Open a .rtf in a text editor and the top of the file is a font table listing every typeface used, then a colour table of every colour, then a stylesheet, then generator metadata. Depending on what wrote it, this preamble can be longer than the document.

A naive parser that stripped the braces and printed what was left would produce a PDF beginning with a list of font names and colour definitions. The converter instead recognises those destination groups by name — font tables, colour tables, stylesheets, document info, embedded pictures, list tables, headers and footers, generator strings — and skips each one entirely, along with anything marked with the `\*` prefix that RTF uses for extensions a reader may not understand.

This is the single largest difference between output you can use and output you cannot.

What comes through

Document text: The body of the document, in order, with the control words that are not text removed.
Paragraph and line breaks: The `\par` and `\line` control words become real breaks, so the document keeps its paragraph structure rather than running together.
Tabs: Preserved as tabs, so tab-separated content keeps its separation.
Accented and non-ASCII characters: Decoded. RTF encodes anything outside ASCII as a numeric escape — `\u233` for é — followed by a fallback character for readers too old to understand the escape. Both halves are handled: the escape is decoded and the fallback that follows it is discarded, so you get one é rather than é followed by a stray letter.
Bold, italic, fonts and colours: Not applied. These are control words the converter passes over; the text they applied to comes through as text.
Tables and images: Table cell content comes through as text without the grid. Embedded images are inside picture groups, which are skipped — an RTF stores them as hex-encoded blobs, and a parser that did not skip them would emit pages of hexadecimal.

Where RTF files come from

Knowing the source helps predict the result. WordPad's own RTF is simple and converts very cleanly. RTF exported by Word is far more elaborate — Word writes extensive style and revision information — but the destination-skipping handles it.

The awkward cases are RTF generated by reporting systems and line-of-business applications, which sometimes emit unusual or malformed structures. Those normally still convert, because the parser skips what it does not recognise rather than failing on it, but a document that arrives with sections missing is usually one of these.

If you have the option of exporting .docx instead of .rtf from the same system, take it — DOCX is more explicit about structure and preserves heading levels, which RTF's control-word stream does not carry across in a form this converter can use.

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.