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RTF to PDF

Convert Rich Text Format documents into PDFs.

Paper size
Orientation

Heading sizes and paragraph breaks are preserved. Embedded images, tracked changes and complex tables fall back to plain text.
Processed on your device. We never see your files.

How to use RTF to PDF

What is an RTF file?

RTF (Rich Text Format) is a document format Microsoft published in 1987 as an interchange format between word processors. Unlike the binary .doc or the zipped XML .docx, an RTF file is plain text you can open in any text editor — its formatting is encoded as backslash-prefixed control words like \b for bold, \i for italic, \par for paragraph break, and \fs24 for font size in half-points. Groups of formatting are wrapped in curly braces. The result is human-readable, lightweight, and supported by almost every word processor ever written — Word, WordPad, LibreOffice, Apple Pages, Google Docs (on import), and a long tail of older editors.

What is a PDF?

A PDF (Portable Document Format) is a fixed-layout document format created by Adobe in 1993 and now an open ISO standard. Where RTF is an interchange format whose appearance depends on the editor opening it, a PDF locks in the layout — paper size, margins, font, page breaks — so the document looks the same on every device and prints cleanly on any printer.

Why convert RTF to PDF?

The first reason is upload requirements. Most online forms, job application portals, university submission systems and government services accept PDF but not RTF. Converting first is faster than opening the RTF in Word just to use File → Save As.

The second reason is distribution. RTF can render slightly differently in different editors — WordPad, Word and LibreOffice each interpret some control words their own way. A PDF removes that variability: what you see is exactly what your reader sees.

The third reason is archival. RTF is a durable format on its own, but a PDF snapshot of the final version is what most records-management systems expect. Keeping the editable RTF alongside a frozen PDF is a sensible pattern for documents you need to file or send.

How to use this RTF to PDF converter

  1. Drop an .rtf file onto the dropzone, or click to browse and pick one. The file is read locally — only its bytes enter the browser’s memory.
  2. Pick a paper size — A4 for most of the world, US Letter for North America, or US Legal for long documents.
  3. Pick an orientation — portrait suits most letters, reports and articles; landscape is better for wide tables or code listings.
  4. Optionally edit the filename so the download name matches your document.
  5. Click Convert to PDF. The inline RTF extractor walks the document, pulls out paragraphs and heading hints, hands the structured text to the HTML renderer, and pdf-lib assembles the final file. The PDF downloads as soon as it is built.

Quality tips for RTF to PDF

The conversion is best on documents that are mostly text and structure — letters, articles, essays, contract drafts, meeting notes, simple reports. The extractor reads \par for paragraph breaks and recognises common heading control words, so a well-structured document keeps its hierarchy in the PDF.

If your RTF was created by saving from Word, it will often contain a lot of compatibility cruft that the extractor simply ignores. This is harmless — the visible text and paragraph structure still come through cleanly.

If your document is image-heavy or contains complex tables, expect those parts to fall back to plain text or be skipped. For those documents, opening in Word or LibreOffice and using their built-in PDF export is the better path; this converter is optimised for the common case of “RTF I need to hand someone as a PDF, today, without installing software.”

Privacy

Your RTF document never leaves your browser tab. The extractor is inline JavaScript bundled with the page; pdf-lib is loaded once and then cached. There is no upload, no server-side processing, no logging of file contents or filenames. You can confirm this in your browser’s Network panel, or simply switch off Wi-Fi after the page loads and watch the converter still work.

Browser and reader compatibility

The output is a standard PDF 1.7 file with Helvetica embedded as one of the 14 PDF standard fonts — supported by every modern reader without needing to download a font. It opens identically in Adobe Acrobat, Apple Preview, the built-in PDF viewers in Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari, and on mobile readers for iOS and Android. Because the text is real text rather than a rasterised image, the PDF is searchable, copy-pasteable, and friendly to screen readers.

Frequently asked questions

Which Word and WordPad features survive the conversion?
Plain text content, paragraphs, line breaks and heading-style hints (so a title written as \fs36 will come out larger than body text) are preserved. Bold and italic from straightforward \b and \i control words are honoured. What does not survive: embedded images, tracked changes and revision marks, complex multi-column tables, footnotes, headers and footers, equations, and OLE objects like embedded charts. The converter is honest about this — for documents that depend on those features, export to DOCX from your editor and use ToolJutsu's Word to PDF tool instead.
How does the tool handle non-English text and special characters?
RTF supports text via several mechanisms — direct UTF-8 bytes in modern RTF, the older \u1234? Unicode escape for code points above 127, and \'XX hex escapes for legacy code-page characters. The inline extractor handles all three: it decodes \u escapes into real Unicode characters and translates \'XX byte values using the document's declared codepage. Accents, Cyrillic, Greek and CJK characters generally come through correctly. Right-to-left scripts like Arabic and Hebrew render visually but with simpler bidirectional handling than a full word processor would do.
What happens to tracked changes and comments?
They are stripped. RTF stores tracked changes as \revised, \deleted and similar control groups, and comments live inside \atnauthor and \atnid groups. The converter treats the document as a finished read-only artefact, so deleted text is removed and inserted text is kept (matching what 'Accept All Changes' would do in Word). If you need a marked-up review copy, accept or reject the changes in Word first and then convert the clean version.
Why does the tool say embedded images won't appear?
RTF stores images as hex-encoded blobs inside \pict groups, and decoding them reliably across the many image sub-formats RTF supports (WMF, EMF, PNG, JPEG, with various wrappers) needs a much larger codebase than the roughly 150-line extractor we ship. Rather than half-supporting images, the converter strips \pict groups and produces a clean text PDF. If your document is image-heavy, open it in Word or LibreOffice, save as PDF directly, or convert it to DOCX first and use ToolJutsu's Word to PDF tool.
Are my RTF documents uploaded anywhere?
No. The RTF parser is a small inline JavaScript function and pdf-lib is loaded once from this site and then cached. Both run inside your browser tab using the file you drop on the page. No part of the document is sent over the network, and no metadata about the file is logged. You can verify this in your browser's Network panel or by disconnecting from the internet — the converter will still produce your PDF offline.

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