Convert RTF to text as a plain .txt file

To convert RTF to TXT, press Select RTF file or drop your .rtf on the tool above, then press Convert to TXT. There is nothing to set. Our server opens the Rich Text document and saves its words as a plain .txt in one step, and the name carries over, so minutes.rtf comes back as minutes.txt.

This RTF to text converter grades the route Words only. The words of the main text all arrive, in reading order, while fonts, sizes, bold, italics, colours and pictures do not. A few parts that sit outside the main text are left out as well, which matters if your document leans on them. We checked each part with test files:

An RTF file is text wrapped in formatting codes that start with a backslash. Read one with a script or paste it raw into a box that expects text, and those codes come along with every word. A .txt holds only the words, so it is the safer file for a web form, a code comment, a notes app, or a program that reads text line by line.

If the formatting matters, plain text is the wrong target. Convert RTF to ODT for LibreOffice Writer, or convert RTF to Word for a .docx you can edit. Both are one step, graded Exact, and from our test file each kept the table, the bold words, the footnote and the picture that the .txt left behind.

Other files have their own way to plain text: convert HTML to text for a saved web page, or convert PowerPoint to text for the words on a deck's slides. Going the other way, convert text to RTF to make a .txt ready for formatting: each line becomes a paragraph, with blank lines and tabs kept.

The .txt is saved as UTF-8, the standard text encoding, with a byte order mark: an invisible marker at the very start that tells editors which encoding the file uses. In our tests accents, the £ and € signs, Greek, Cyrillic, Chinese, Japanese and an emoji all came through, and so did an older RTF written in the Cyrillic Windows code page. Chinese and Japanese, which our RTF to PDF route prints as empty boxes, arrive here as real text, because a text file needs no fonts.

• Each line ends with a single line feed, the style Mac and Linux use, rather than the carriage return and line feed pair of Windows (CRLF).
• A paragraph is one long line. Your editor may wrap it on screen, but the file holds no breaks inside it.
• A page break leaves no mark: the next page simply starts on the next line.

Plain text cannot mark words as deleted or hidden, so two things arrive that you may not expect:

• Tracked changes that were never accepted. In our test the deleted words and the added words both appeared, side by side, with nothing to tell them apart.
• Hidden text. Words formatted as hidden in your word processor came through as ordinary words.

Accept or reject every change and delete any hidden text in your word processor, save the RTF, then convert it. Comments need no clean-up, as they are left out.