RTF to PDF
Convert a Rich Text Format (.rtf) document into a PDF — entirely in your browser. Best for prose; tables and embedded images are not supported in v0.1.
Select an .rtf file
or drop one here — processed locally in your browser, no upload
—
Best for prose — articles, reports, simple letters. Tables, columns, and embedded images are dropped from the output in v0.1.
Your file is ready
Processed entirely in your browser — the file never left your device.
How to convert RTF to PDF
Three steps. Everything happens locally.
Open the .rtf
Pick or drop a Rich Text file. It's parsed in your browser.
Pick page size
A4, Letter, or Legal.
Download
pdf-lib builds the PDF in your tab — download instantly.
How RTF to PDF works on this page
Rich Text Format (RTF) is a plain-text document format invented by
Microsoft in 1987 to ferry styled documents between word processors.
It uses control words like \b for bold and \par
for paragraph breaks, all wrapped in curly braces. We parse those
control words with a small built-in tokeniser, walk the resulting
token stream while tracking style state, then draw each paragraph
onto a PDF page with pdf-lib. Both the parser and the PDF builder
run inside your browser tab — no upload, no server, no account.
What converts well
- Body text: paragraphs, line breaks, bold/italic/underline.
- Font sizes:
\fshalf-point sizes are honoured per run. - Alignment: left, center, right (
\ql/\qc/\qr). - Page breaks: explicit
\pagecontrol words start a new PDF page. - Unicode:
\uNNNNUnicode escapes and common smart-punctuation control words.
What this version can't do (yet)
- Tables. v0.1 drops table content.
- Embedded images. Pictures inside RTF
{\pict ...}groups are skipped. - Multi-column layouts and text boxes.
- OLE objects, fields, and form controls.
- Original fonts. We use standard PDF Helvetica so nothing is fetched over the network.
Privacy & security
RTF is the export format many email clients use for "save as message" and many older Word documents are still distributed as .rtf. These files frequently contain confidential material — drafts, internal memos, customer correspondence. Most online "convert to PDF" services upload the file to their servers. Because this tool processes everything locally there's no upload step to intercept, no server-side temp file, and no retention window to worry about.
Frequently asked questions
No. The .rtf file is parsed entirely inside your browser by our small built-in RTF tokeniser, and the PDF is built with pdf-lib in your tab. Nothing leaves your device. You can verify this in your browser's Network tab.
Rich Text Format is a plain-text document format used by older versions of Word, TextEdit on macOS, WordPad on Windows, and many email clients for "rich" message export. It travels well across platforms but doesn't open as cleanly in modern viewers as PDF does. Converting to PDF gives you a fixed, universally readable copy.
Good for prose. We handle paragraphs, bold, italic, underline, font-size changes, basic alignment (left/center/right), explicit page breaks, bullet markers, and most punctuation escapes. We do NOT render tables, embedded images, columns, or OLE objects — they're dropped in v0.1.
We use the standard PDF Helvetica family (Regular/Bold/Italic/Bold-Italic). Embedding the original RTF fonts would require fetching font files over the network, which would break the "everything stays in your browser" guarantee. The result looks clean and consistent, but isn't a pixel-perfect re-render of your original RTF styling.
We support \uNNNN Unicode escapes used by every modern RTF writer, plus the common smart-quote / em-dash / ellipsis control words. Characters that can't be encoded by Helvetica's standard glyph set (e.g. CJK, Cyrillic) are replaced with "?" — disclosed in the UI when it happens.