CONVERT RTF → TXT (RTF to TXT)
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Ghostscript + QPDFHOW TO CONVERT RTF → TXT
Drop the RTF file
Upload your document — or a ZIP of several documents for batch conversion — through the web form.
Convert through libreoffice
Our libreoffice-based pipeline opens the RTF, preserves structure and typography, and writes the TXT.
Retrieve the document
Click the download button; the TXT is delivered as a single file (or ZIP of files for batch jobs).
RTF (Rich Text Format) is a Microsoft-originated interchange format that encodes document structure using escape sequences and control words — strings like \b, \fs24, or \colortbl — embedded directly in a 7-bit ASCII stream. A typical RTF file wraps every paragraph in group braces, annotates each run of text with font table references, color indices, and spacing instructions, and can embed objects ranging from OLE containers to raw binary picture blobs. None of that structure survives a conversion to plain TXT. What TXT delivers is the naked character sequence: the actual words a reader would see on screen, stripped of every formatting instruction, every table grid, every embedded image, and every document property. The conversion is not compression — the output file is usually smaller not because data was compressed but because roughly 30–70 percent of a typical RTF file's byte count consists of control words and metadata that carry zero lexical content. For a document that was authored in RTF purely as a transport wrapper — migrated from an older word processor, exported by a legacy legal or medical system, or received from a mainframe report generator — plain TXT is often the only downstream format that every tool in a processing pipeline can consume without a dependency on an RTF parser.
Why convert RTF to TXT
RTF was designed in 1987 as a cross-application clipboard format, and it shows its age. Modern plaintext pipelines — log ingestors, NLP tokenizers, grep scripts, database import routines, diff tools, and terminal-based editors — either fail to parse RTF control words or treat them as garbage text. A file that opens cleanly in WordPad or LibreOffice Writer will produce a screen full of backslash noise in any context that expects UTF-8 or ASCII prose. Converting to TXT removes that barrier instantly. The other common driver is archival: organizations that need to retain document text for search indexing or regulatory compliance often prefer the absolute simplicity of TXT, where content is readable by any tool in existence, now or in twenty years, with no dependency on a format specification.
RTF vs TXT — 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
- LIBREOFFICE
TXT
- MIME type
- text/plain
- MIME Type
- text/plain
- Extension
- .txt
- Category
- Documents & Text
- Full Name
- Plain Text
- Conversion Engine
- LIBREOFFICE
- Common encodings
- UTF-8, UTF-16, ASCII, ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252
- Line endings
- LF (Unix), CRLF (Windows), CR (classic Mac)
- Max file size
- Limited only by filesystem (no format-level limit)
- Structure
- None — flat sequence of characters
| Specification | RTF | TXT |
|---|---|---|
| MIME type | application/rtf | text/plain |
| Extensions | .rtf | — |
| Standard | RTF Specification 1.9.1 (2008) | — |
| Character set | ASCII with Unicode escapes (\u) | — |
| MIME Type | application/rtf | text/plain |
| Extension | .rtf | .txt |
| Category | Documents & Text | Documents & Text |
| Full Name | Rich Text Format | Plain Text |
| Conversion Engine | LIBREOFFICE | LIBREOFFICE |
| Common encodings | — | UTF-8, UTF-16, ASCII, ISO-8859-1, Windows-1252 |
| Line endings | — | LF (Unix), CRLF (Windows), CR (classic Mac) |
| Max file size | — | Limited only by filesystem (no format-level limit) |
| Structure | — | None — flat sequence of characters |
RTF vs TXT — 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.
TXT Strengths
- Universally readable — every operating system, every editor, every programming language.
- Zero metadata overhead: the file size equals the character count (for ASCII).
- Safe to diff, grep, version-control, and pipe through command-line tools.
- Immune to format obsolescence: a text file from 1970 still opens today.
- Tiny footprint for structured data like logs or configuration.
Limitations
- No styling, images, or embedded structure — just characters.
- Character encoding ambiguity (ISO-8859-1 vs UTF-8 vs Windows-1252) causes "mojibake".
- Line-ending differences between OSes still cause subtle bugs today.
Quality & Compatibility
RTF stores text in Windows-1252 or a codepage declared in its font table; the converter must remap those bytes to UTF-8 for TXT output, and characters that have no clean mapping — certain typographic symbols in older RTF files — may be substituted or dropped. All formatting is discarded without substitution: bold, italic, font sizes, colors, tables, headers, footers, footnotes, tracked changes, and embedded images vanish entirely. RTF's \pard and \par control words, which mark paragraph and line breaks, are converted to newline characters in TXT, so paragraph structure is preserved at the level of line breaks, but indentation expressed via \li or \fi control words is lost. OLE objects and binary picture data (\pict blobs) are silently stripped — there is no TXT equivalent. RTF metadata stored in the \info group (author, creation date, revision count) is also dropped. What survives is the plain reading text of each paragraph, in reading order, encoded as UTF-8.
Tips for Best Results
- If your RTF file originated from a legacy Windows application using a non-Latin codepage (Russian, Greek, Central European), verify the output TXT encoding immediately — RTF declares its codepage in the \ansicpg control word, and if that declaration is missing or wrong, high-byte characters will convert incorrectly. Open the TXT result in a hex viewer or check for replacement characters before discarding the original.
- RTF supports tracked changes through the \revisions group: accepted and rejected edits both exist in the binary stream simultaneously. Most converters extract the accepted (final) text, but some naive parsers emit both versions interleaved, producing garbled output. If your source document had revision history, compare word counts between source and output to detect this.
- Table content in RTF is encoded with \trowd, \cellx, and \cell control words that mark cell boundaries — not whitespace. After conversion to TXT, columns from the same row will run together with no separator. If you need to preserve tabular structure, consider converting to CSV or a tab-delimited format instead, or post-process the TXT output by inserting tab characters at the former cell boundaries before using the file downstream.
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 TXT at full resolution, editable tables become native TXT tables, and hyperlinks keep their URLs. Complex features unique to RTF — macros, form fields, track-changes — are mapped where an equivalent exists in TXT 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.
Plain Text
Target formatTXT files contain unformatted plain text with no styling, images, or layout information. They are universally readable by any device and operating system, making them the simplest document format.
Common Use Cases
Share across platforms
Send TXT files to anyone without worrying about whether they have the right software for RTF.
Embed in documents
Drop TXT output into Word, Google Docs, PowerPoint, Notion or a website without conversion warnings.
Optimize size
TXT 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 TXT — 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
- Short note < 1 KB
- README file 2–20 KB
- Full novel (~90,000 words) 500 KB – 1 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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