RTF to TXT Converter Online

Need plain text from a Rich Text Format document? Our free RTF to TXT converter strips all formatting from your RTF file and delivers a clean plain text file — no font codes, no colour markup, no embedded control characters. Just the words, ready to use anywhere.

RTF files contain their content and formatting interleaved in a single text stream of control words and escape sequences. While a word processor hides all of this and shows you the formatted document, underneath there is a mass of formatting codes mixed in with the actual text. When you need just the text content — for a database import, a CMS paste, a script input, or a search index — those formatting codes are noise that needs to be stripped.

When Is RTF to TXT Conversion Useful?

Content management systems and publishing workflows are a frequent use case. Editors who receive articles, reports, or documents in RTF from legal or healthcare partners, older document systems, or legacy applications need clean plain text that can be pasted into a CMS field without formatting artifacts causing display problems.

Developer pipelines that process document text need plain text input. Whether the task is text analysis, search indexing, keyword extraction, or feeding content to a language model, plain TXT is the starting point. Parsing RTF format directly to extract clean text requires an RTF parser — converting to TXT first makes the content universally accessible.

Research and archiving workflows benefit when collections of RTF documents need to be searched, compared, or processed as plain text. Converting to TXT enables standard text search tools, grep, and full-text search systems to work across the collection.

Legal and compliance teams who need to extract text from RTF contracts, correspondence, and filings for review, comparison, or import into matter management systems use plain text extraction regularly.

What Is Extracted and What Is Not

All text content from the RTF document is extracted in reading order — body text, headings as plain lines, list items, table cell content in tab-separated form, captions, headers, and footer text. Tables are output as tab-separated rows preserving the column structure.

All RTF formatting codes are stripped — fonts, colours, bold, italic, margins, spacing, and all control words. Images and embedded objects are not included. The output is clean UTF-8 plain text.

How to Convert RTF to TXT

Upload your RTF file by clicking the upload button or dragging it into the upload area. The converter extracts all text content and produces a TXT file. Download the result and open it in any text editor or import it directly into your system. Your file is deleted from our servers after download.