Convert RTF to TEXT — Free Online Converter

RTF stores text content alongside formatting control words in a plain-text file. While RTF is technically text-based, it is not human-readable — the control words (\b, \par, \trowd) make the raw file incomprehensible to anyone not parsing RTF syntax. Converting RTF to plain text (TEXT) strips all control words and formatting, leaving only the readable content — clean, human-readable text without any markup.

The resulting text file contains every word from the RTF document, laid out sequentially with paragraph breaks, but with no fonts, no colors, no tables, no images — just the raw textual content. This is the most thorough format simplification available.

Plain text is needed for text processing workflows. Search indexing, NLP analysis, content migration, diff comparison, and programmatic text handling all work with plain text. RTF, despite being text-based, cannot be processed by these tools without first stripping the control words.

Plain text extraction also reveals the actual content of an RTF file without formatting distractions. For content review, word counting, plagiarism detection, and text analysis, stripping formatting to plain text lets you focus entirely on the words.

LibreOffice or a dedicated RTF parser reads the control word stream, building a text model by following formatting commands while extracting only the text content. Control groups (\b, \i, \f, \pard) are parsed for structure but only text characters are retained in the output. Paragraph breaks (\par) become newlines. Table cells (\cell) are separated by tab characters. Hex-encoded special characters (\'xx) and Unicode escapes (\uN) are decoded to their UTF-8 representations. All images and non-text content are discarded.