What an RTF file is
RTF stands for Rich Text Format. It is an older, widely supported document format that stores text together with formatting instructions, and it is readable by many word processors across different systems. Inside the file, formatting is written as backslash commands, such as codes for paragraphs, tabs, bold text and fonts, with curly braces grouping them.
If you opened an RTF file in a plain text editor, you would see the words surrounded by a lot of those commands. That is why a simple conversion can be useful: it removes the commands and leaves the words.
This tool does exactly that, in a deliberately simple way. It turns paragraph and tab codes into line breaks and tabs, decodes the common accented-character escapes, and removes the remaining control words and braces. The output is a plain .txt file.
When you would want only the text
Plain text is the most portable form of a document. You might need it to paste into a form that does not accept formatting, to feed into a script or text analysis, to archive the wording of an old file, or to read a document when you have no word processor handy.
It is also a good way to strip formatting that is causing trouble. Fonts, colors and odd spacing disappear, leaving clean content that you can restyle somewhere else.
The cost is that formatting is gone for good. Fonts, colors, images and tables are not preserved, and the extraction is a lightweight text-based cleanup rather than a full RTF parser. For files with complex content, such as embedded images, tables or special encodings, some stray text or missing characters can show up, and the best fidelity comes from opening the file in a word processor.
How to extract text from an RTF file
- Drag an .rtf file onto the drop area, or click it to browse.
- The extracted text appears in a read-only box. Scroll through it to check the result.
- Click Copy to put the text on your clipboard, or Download .txt to save it as a text file with your original file name and a .txt ending.
- Click Start over to load a different file.
The file is read as text in your browser and not uploaded anywhere. The text box is read-only, so if you want to change the wording, copy it into an editor first.
Limits to keep in mind
Only files with the .rtf ending are offered in the file picker. Other formats, such as .docx, are a different structure, so use a matching tool for those. If you have a PDF and want its words, PDF to DOC extracts text in a similar spirit.
Check the beginning and end of the output. Because the extraction removes control words with a simple pattern, things like font tables or metadata can occasionally leave a trace of unwanted text, and some special characters may not translate. If a word or two looks wrong, fix it by hand after copying.
Once you have clean text, the Word Counter can give you quick length figures. Remember that if a document came from someone else, you should only reuse its text in ways the owner allows.