CONVERT RTF → MD (RTF to MD)
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Ghostscript + QPDFHOW TO CONVERT RTF → MD
Upload your RTF
Drop the document onto the uploader. We transfer over HTTPS and keep the file in an isolated processing container.
Render with LibreOffice
LibreOffice opens the RTF headlessly and writes it as MD with styles, tables and images mapped across.
Download the MD
The MD is ready to download; typography, pagination and embedded assets match what you saw in the source.
RTF was designed in 1987 as a tagged ASCII interchange format: every character attribute — font family, point size, foreground color, paragraph indentation — is encoded with backslash control words and curly-brace groups, making a simple bold word look like {\b bold\b0} in raw form. Markdown, by contrast, is semantic plain text: it encodes structure (headings, emphasis, lists, code fences, links) but deliberately discards visual presentation. The conversion is therefore not symmetric. You are trading a format that carries how text looks for one that carries what text means, and the two vocabularies only partially overlap. The practical driver is migration into modern text toolchains: static site generators such as Hugo, Jekyll, and Docusaurus; documentation platforms such as MkDocs or GitHub wikis; and plain-text editors such as Obsidian or VS Code — all of which expect Markdown and have no native RTF parser.
Why convert RTF to MD
RTF files accumulate in Windows-centric workflows — WordPad, older versions of Word, and many legal or medical documentation systems all default to RTF. When that content needs to move into a Git-tracked documentation repository, a static site generator, or a collaborative knowledge base like Obsidian or Notion, RTF is a dead end: none of those tools parse it. Markdown is the lingua franca of developer documentation and modern writing tools, readable as plain text in any editor, diffable in version control, and renderable without proprietary software. Converting RTF to MD is the practical step that ends a document's life in a legacy binary-adjacent format and starts it in a toolchain-neutral one.
RTF vs MD — Technical specifications
Side-by-side comparison of the technical details.
RTF
- MIME type
- application/rtf
- Extensions
- .rtf
- Standard
- RTF Specification 1.9.1 (2008)
- Character set
- ASCII with Unicode escapes (\u)
- MIME Type
- application/rtf
- Extension
- .rtf
- Category
- Documents & Text
- Full Name
- Rich Text Format
- Conversion Engine
- PANDOC
MD
- MIME type
- text/markdown
- Extensions
- .md, .markdown, .mdown, .mkd
- Standard
- CommonMark, GitHub Flavored Markdown (GFM)
- MIME Type
- text/markdown
- Extension
- .md
- Category
- Documents & Text
- Full Name
- Markdown
- Conversion Engine
- PANDOC
- Encoding
- UTF-8 (conventional)
- Companion spec
- RFC 7763 (2016)
| Specification | RTF | MD |
|---|---|---|
| MIME type | application/rtf | text/markdown |
| Extensions | .rtf | .md, .markdown, .mdown, .mkd |
| Standard | RTF Specification 1.9.1 (2008) | CommonMark, GitHub Flavored Markdown (GFM) |
| Character set | ASCII with Unicode escapes (\u) | — |
| MIME Type | application/rtf | text/markdown |
| Extension | .rtf | .md |
| Category | Documents & Text | Documents & Text |
| Full Name | Rich Text Format | Markdown |
| Conversion Engine | PANDOC | PANDOC |
| Encoding | — | UTF-8 (conventional) |
| Companion spec | — | RFC 7763 (2016) |
RTF vs MD — Strengths and limitations
What each format does best, and where it falls short.
RTF Strengths
- Plain ASCII — portable, grep-able, and diff-friendly.
- Supported by every word processor on every OS since 1990.
- Cannot carry macros or embedded code — relatively safe to open.
- Simple enough to parse by hand or generate with a small script.
- Good interchange format when DOCX compatibility is shaky.
Limitations
- Frozen in 2008 — no modern features (no comments, poor styles, no track changes).
- File sizes are bigger than DOCX for the same content (no compression).
- Images are base64-encoded inline, inflating files further.
MD Strengths
- Readable as plain text even before rendering — fits in version control beautifully.
- Dead-simple: 90% of needs covered in 10 minutes of learning.
- Converts trivially to HTML, PDF, EPUB, and DOCX via Pandoc.
- Every modern IDE, note-taking app, and developer tool renders it natively.
- Lightweight — a typical Markdown file is kilobytes, not megabytes.
Limitations
- No formal authoritative spec — CommonMark, GFM, and MultiMarkdown differ on edge cases.
- Tables and complex layouts are clunky; footnotes and math require extensions.
- Links to images stay external — no embedded media unless you base64-inline.
Quality & Compatibility
Text content and inline emphasis (bold and italic, mapped to ** and _ respectively) survive the conversion reliably. Hyperlinks stored in RTF field groups with HYPERLINK instructions are extracted and become standard [text](url) Markdown links. Ordered and unordered lists carry over correctly. What is lost is everything purely presentational: font family, point size, foreground and background color, and paragraph indentation have no Markdown equivalents and are silently dropped. Embedded images in RTF are hex-encoded binary blobs (typically WMF or EMF on Windows, PICT on older Mac files) — they cannot become inline Markdown content and are discarded unless the converter extracts them as separate files and inserts image reference syntax. RTF tables, defined by \trowd and \cellx control words, can only be preserved if the target dialect is GitHub Flavored Markdown (GFM) which supports pipe tables; CommonMark has no table syntax. Footnotes (\footnote groups) depend entirely on whether the converter targets an extended dialect. The RTF \info metadata block (author, creation date, subject) has no body-level representation in Markdown and is lost. Non-ASCII characters encoded as \uN Unicode escapes should decode correctly if the converter handles the RTF codepage declarations properly.
Tips for Best Results
- If your RTF file uses named paragraph styles (Heading 1, Heading 2) rather than just font-size differences, verify that the converter maps those style names to # and ## headings rather than treating them as large bold text — the difference determines whether your document has a navigable heading structure in Markdown renderers.
- Tables in RTF are defined by low-level \trowd and \cellx control words; if the converted Markdown file will be rendered on GitHub or in MkDocs, confirm your converter outputs GFM pipe-table syntax, since standard CommonMark omits tables entirely and the content would appear as unseparated text.
- Embedded images (WMF, EMF, or PICT blobs) are not carried into Markdown — after conversion, open the source RTF in WordPad or LibreOffice Writer, export each image manually as PNG or JPEG, save them alongside the .md file, and insert  references at the appropriate positions in the converted document.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes, as long as the fonts are standard (system fonts or common office fonts like Arial, Calibri, Times, Helvetica). Custom corporate fonts survive if they are embedded in the source document; otherwise the conversion substitutes the closest available match, which can shift line breaks by a character or two.
Yes. Inline images are embedded into the MD at full resolution, editable tables become native MD tables, and hyperlinks keep their URLs. Complex features unique to RTF — macros, form fields, track-changes — are mapped where an equivalent exists in MD and flattened into static content otherwise.
All uploads go over TLS, files are processed in isolated containers and both the source and the output are deleted within two hours. No account is required, file contents are never indexed or used for training, and the paid plan adds a signable data-processing agreement for regulated workflows.
Rich Text Format
Source formatRTF is a cross-platform document format that supports basic text formatting like bold, italic, fonts, and colors. It is readable by virtually all word processors, making it useful for maximum compatibility.
Markdown
Target formatMarkdown is a lightweight markup language that uses plain text formatting syntax. It is widely used in software development, technical documentation, and content management systems.
Common Use Cases
Share across platforms
Send MD files to anyone without worrying about whether they have the right software for RTF.
Embed in documents
Drop MD output into Word, Google Docs, PowerPoint, Notion or a website without conversion warnings.
Optimize size
MD often produces smaller files than RTF for web, email and storage.
Archive & future-proof
Store in a widely-supported format that will still open on future operating systems without legacy plugins.
RTF vs MD — Typical file sizes
Approximate file sizes for common scenarios.
- Short formatted letter 15-50 KB
- 20-page report with styling 150 KB - 1 MB
- Document with embedded images 2-20 MB
- README 1-15 KB
- Blog post 2-30 KB
- Full technical manual 50 KB - 2 MB
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Related comparisons
See these formats side by side to understand which fits your use case best.
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