tigtools

RTF to Text

Choose an .rtf file to get its text without formatting. The file is decoded in your browser.

Runs in your browser No sign-up

or drop it here. The file stays on your device.

How to use it

  1. Choose or drop an .rtf file.
  2. Check the text and the word count.
  3. Copy the text or download it as a UTF-8 .txt file.

How it works

RTF (Rich Text Format) is a text file full of formatting commands such as \b for bold or \par for a new paragraph. The tool reads those commands with a small RTF parser: paragraphs, line breaks, page and section breaks become line breaks, tabs stay tabs, and table cells are separated by tabs with one table row per line. Special characters written as commands (dashes, curly quotes, bullets, non-breaking spaces) are converted.

Characters are decoded from both RTF encodings: Unicode escapes (\u) and bytes in the document's code page (\ansicpg, Windows-1252 by default) or in the code page of the font's character set, so Turkish, Central European, Greek and Cyrillic text written by older programs also comes out right.

Everything that is not document text is skipped: font, colour and style tables, document properties, embedded pictures and objects, field codes (the visible result of a field is kept), headers, footers, footnotes and comments. All formatting is removed.

Examples

Old WordPad documents

Letters saved years ago in WordPad as .rtf open here as plain text that can be pasted into any editor.

Text from an export

Some programs export reports only as RTF. Converting gives the text, with table rows as tab-separated lines ready to paste into a spreadsheet.

Frequently asked questions

Are images or tables kept?

Images are skipped. Tables become lines of text with tab-separated cells, which you can paste into a spreadsheet.

Why are footnotes and headers missing?

They are stored separately from the body text in RTF and are skipped to keep the main text readable.

Some characters look wrong. Why?

The file probably uses a code page that your browser does not support, or declares the wrong one. Open it in a word processor and save it again as RTF or as UTF-8 text.

Privacy

The RTF file is decoded in your browser. The document and its text are not uploaded, stored or included in analytics; only an anonymous event that the tool was used is counted.