Convert RTF (.rtf) to Markdown
Turns a Rich Text Format document into Markdown — the format WordPad, older line-of-business systems and mail attachments still produce. Everything runs inside your browser, so the file is never uploaded.
When this helps
Anyone handling system output
Reports and notices come out of an internal system as .rtf and are awkward to reuse
Convert to Markdown so the content can go straight into a wiki or a document
Anyone feeding documents to an LLM
Opening a .rtf in a text editor shows control words, not text
Convert first, then paste the readable version into a chat
Anyone working across macOS and Windows
The .rtf opens, but the formatting falls apart in the other platform's editor
Take the content as Markdown, since the formatting was never the point
Anyone searching an old mail archive
Attachments are .rtf and nothing indexes them
Convert each one and keep the text alongside
FAQ
- Is my file uploaded to your server?
- No. If your browser supports WebAssembly (WASM, a technology for running software inside the browser safely and quickly), the conversion happens entirely on your device. The 2.2MB engine loads on the first run only.
- Will non-English text come out correctly?
- Yes. RTF declares its character encoding inside the file itself, and that declaration is honoured. Japanese files written on Shift_JIS Windows and Cyrillic files both read correctly in testing — this is the failure mode worth checking, since a wrong guess turns text into nonsense that still looks like a successful conversion.
- What is kept and what is lost?
- Kept: headings, bold and italic, bulleted and numbered lists, tables and links. Lost: images, fonts and colours, headers and footers — Markdown has no way to express them.
- Which other formats does this page accept?
- .docx, .xlsx and .pptx, .doc, .xls and .ppt, OpenDocument (.odt, .ods, .odp), .epub, .csv and .pdf. The format is detected from the file's contents, not its name.
- Will every .rtf convert?
- Across 42 real files, 37 converted. The rest carried their content as embedded objects with no extractable text. When there is nothing to extract the tool says so rather than returning an empty file.
- What is the file size limit?
- 20MB per file.
Related tools
- Legacy Word (.doc) to Markdown — For Word 97-2003 documents
- Word (.docx) to Markdown — For the modern Word format
- Character encoding detection — When a plain text file's encoding is unknown
- Personal information redaction — Strip names and contact details out of the converted text before sharing it