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RTF to TXT Converter

Convert a Rich Text Format file to plain text. A small RTF reader built into the page walks through the groups and control words, skips font tables, colour tables, stylesheets, pictures and document info, and turns paragraph, line and tab codes into real line breaks and tabs. Accented letters and Unicode characters are decoded according to the file's code page.

Document Conversion Runs in your browser

Convert RTF to Plain Text

Drag and drop an RTF file here, or click to browseAccepted: RTF. The content is loaded into the box below. Up to 25 MB.

How to Use the RTF to TXT

  1. Choose an .rtf file, or paste the RTF code into the box.
  2. Optionally collapse runs of blank lines.
  3. Press Convert.
  4. Copy the text or download the .txt file.

About This Tool

Anyone who has an old .rtf document, a WordPad file or an exported note and wants just the text.

Input: RTF  ·  Output: TXT.

Features and Limitations

Features

  • Decodes \'hh accented characters using the document's code page (Windows-1252 and others).
  • Handles \uN Unicode characters including surrogate pairs and the \ucN fallback skip.
  • Skips fonts, colours, styles, pictures, headers and metadata so only the document text remains.
  • Counts words, characters and lines.

Limitations

  • Only the text is kept. Formatting, tables layout, lists numbering, footnote links, images and embedded objects are dropped; table cells appear as tab-separated text where the RTF marks them.
  • Text in headers, footers and footnotes may appear in the flow or be skipped depending on how the file is written.
  • Very old or unusual double-byte code pages (such as East Asian legacy encodings) may not decode perfectly unless the file also uses \uN escapes.
  • Processing happens on your device, so very large files depend on your browser's available memory.

Example

{\rtf1\ansi Hello \b bold\b0 world.\par Second line.\par} converts to the two lines “Hello bold world.” and “Second line.”.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why are some accented letters wrong?

RTF stores non-ASCII letters in the file's declared code page. If the declaration is missing or unusual, Windows-1252 is assumed, which covers Western European languages.

Does it keep tables?

Table cells and rows are written as tab-separated text, but borders and widths are not kept.

What is the difference between RTF and DOCX?

RTF is an older text-based format understood by WordPad and many editors; DOCX is a zipped XML format. Use the DOCX to TXT tool for .docx files.

Is my file uploaded?

No. The RTF is parsed in your browser.

Related Tools

More like this: all Document Conversion tools, all Files & Documents tools or the TinySandy home page.