Convert an Old RTF Document Into a PDF
Strips the RTF control codes, recovers the readable text including its Unicode and hex character escapes, and typesets it as an A4 PDF with jsPDF. Everything happens in the tab — nothing about the document is sent out.
About the RTF to PDF Converter
Rich Text Format is thirty years old and refuses to die, mostly because it is the safe common denominator between word processors that agree on nothing else. Transcription bureaux still deliver it, older case-management and practice-management systems still export it, and any file saved from WordPad before about 2010 is probably RTF. The format is plain text with formatting instructions embedded as backslash commands, and this tool unpicks those commands to recover the words underneath.
There are no settings. Add the file, convert, and you get an A4 document at eleven point with the filename as a heading. What you will not get is the formatting — this recovers text content, not the appearance of the original.
Key Features
- Handles both character escape styles: RTF encodes unusual characters either as hex byte sequences or as numeric Unicode escapes, and both are decoded, so accented names and typographic quotes come through as characters rather than as codes.
- Removes embedded metadata groups: Comment and revision destinations that RTF stores inline are discarded rather than being dumped into the middle of your text.
- Paragraph structure survives: Paragraph commands are converted to line breaks and runs of blank lines are collapsed, so the document keeps its shape instead of arriving as one continuous block.
- No office suite needed: The file is decoded directly, so you can read a colleague's RTF without Word, WordPad or LibreOffice on the machine.
- Clear failure on empty results: If nothing readable survives the decoding you get a message saying so, rather than a blank PDF you only discover is empty later.
- Decoded in the browser: jsPDF builds the document from a copy stored on this domain, so a transcript or a legacy client file is converted without being uploaded.
How to Use the RTF to PDF Converter
- Add the .rtf file you want as a PDF.
- Press Convert to PDF.
- Download the result and read it through before relying on it.
- If the document contained images, see the note below about what that produces.
How It Works
The decoding is done by pattern-matching rather than by a full RTF parser. Control words are removed, brace groups are unwrapped, and the two escape notations are translated back into characters. For the enormous majority of RTF files — text documents with headings, paragraphs and emphasis — this recovers the content accurately.
It has two known weak spots. Documents containing embedded images store the picture as a very long run of hexadecimal digits inside the file, and because that run is data rather than a control word, it survives the stripping and appears in your PDF as pages of meaningless characters. If your converted document contains a wall of letters and numbers, that is what happened, and the fix is to delete those pages afterwards or to open the original in a word processor and re-save it without the images.
Tables also fare poorly. RTF describes them with cell and row commands that are stripped along with everything else, so the cell contents run together into continuous text with no column structure. A document that is mostly tabular is better opened in an office application.
All formatting is discarded by design: bold, italics, fonts, sizes, colours, alignment and indentation are lost, leaving the text at a uniform size. Character coverage follows the standard PDF font, so Western European text converts correctly while Cyrillic, Greek and Asian scripts will not render.
When You Need It
A transcription service delivers a hearing transcript as RTF because that is what its software produces, and it needs to be circulated as a PDF that everyone can open and nobody can accidentally edit. Transcripts name parties, witnesses and sometimes children, so a conversion that runs on the machine holding the file rather than through an online service is the correct default rather than a preference.
Someone going through an old backup drive finds a folder of documents from the mid-2000s that nothing on a modern machine will open cleanly. Converting them to PDF makes them readable and archivable in one step, without a stack of personal files from someone's past being fed into a web converter to find out what is in them.