RTF to PDF
Convert Rich Text .rtf files to PDF.
Click to upload or drag & drop
Select a Rich Text file (.rtf)
How to use the RTF to PDF
- 1Load the .rtf
Select the Rich Text file from your computer, or drag it onto the panel above.
- 2Interpret and lay out
Click Convert to PDF. LibreOffice parses the RTF control words, resolves the fonts and produces a settled page layout.
- 3Download
Your PDF is delivered as soon as the layout is written out.
Examples
| Input | Output |
|---|---|
1 MB photo pasted in | ~2 MB of hex in the .rtf |
Font named in the font table | Matched, then embedded |
Bold, italic, colour runs | Reproduced exactly |
Unicode escape sequences | Resolved to real characters |
Explicit page break | New page in the PDF |
Macro or script | RTF cannot carry one |
Convert RTF to PDF
Rich Text Format arrived in 1987 as a way for word processors that agreed on nothing to hand documents to one another. Its trick was to be plain text: open an .rtf in a text editor and you see your words surrounded by control words in braces — a font table, a colour table, markers for bold and italics, and a picture group for anything illustrated. Microsoft stopped developing the specification years ago, yet the format refuses to die, because almost every editor ever written can still read it. Here it meets the format at the opposite end of the scale: PDF, which is not about interchange at all but about finality.
One file, four different documents
The weakness of a format built for interchange is that interchange is negotiated. RTF has accumulated decades of extensions, and no two applications implement the same subset. Word understands constructs that WordPad silently discards. Apple’s TextEdit writes its own flavour and shrugs at some of Word’s. LibreOffice reads a broader range than either but makes its own decisions about the ambiguous corners. So the same .rtf, opened in three places, can give you three different line breaks, three different table widths and three different page counts — and you have no way of knowing which one your reader saw.
Rendering the file once to PDF settles the argument. The interpretation is performed a single time, by one engine, and the outcome is nailed to the page: fixed line breaks, fixed pagination, fonts embedded inside the file rather than requested from the reader’s system. Whatever the recipient opens it with, they are looking at the same document you approved.
The size problem, and where it goes
Because RTF must remain readable as text, it cannot hold binary data. Images are therefore written out as long strings of hexadecimal digits, which takes two characters for every byte of the original. That is the whole explanation for the notoriously bloated .rtf: a handful of screenshots in a short memo can push it past ten megabytes while the words themselves account for a few kilobytes. A PDF stores those same pictures as compressed binary streams, so the converted document is very often a fraction of the size of the file you started with.
PDF, or something you can still edit?
Convert to PDF when the document is going out to be read, archived, printed or attached to something official. If the text still has to be worked on, or the file is a legacy export you are trying to modernise, take a different exit:
- Bring it into a current word processor → RTF to DOCX gives you an editable Word document.
- Combine the converted memo with other paperwork → Merge PDF.
- Slim down a PDF that inherited a lot of imagery → Compress PDF.
- Starting from unformatted notes instead of RTF → TXT to PDF.
Processing, plainly stated
Parsing thirty-odd years of RTF dialects and then typesetting the result is the job of a full office suite, and there is no such suite inside a web browser. Your file is passed to one of ours instead. It moves over an encrypted connection, is opened in a temporary directory that exists for your request and no other, and both that directory and the uploaded document are discarded the second the finished PDF leaves the server.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is my .rtf 9 MB when it is only four pages of text?
Pictures. RTF has no compressed container to keep them in, so every image is written into the document as hexadecimal digits — two characters of text for each byte of the original picture. Paste in a four-megapixel photo and you have added roughly eight megabytes of ASCII to a file that is otherwise a few kilobytes of words. The PDF stores the same image as binary, which is one reason the converted file usually shrinks dramatically.
The document looks different in Word and in TextEdit. Which one will the PDF match?
The PDF matches LibreOffice's reading of the markup, which is a thorough and standards-led one. There is no way to match all of them at once, because they genuinely disagree — that is the problem you are solving by converting. If a particular application's rendering is the one that matters to your reader, open the file there, check the first page against the PDF, and adjust the source if something has moved.
Are the fonts in my RTF guaranteed to be used?
Guaranteed to be attempted. An RTF only lists font names in its font table; it never carries the font files themselves, so the renderer has to find a match on the machine doing the work. Common families are present and metric-compatible stand-ins are used where they are not, after which the choice is embedded in the PDF and fixed for good. An obscure licensed typeface installed only on your own PC is the case to watch.
Can an RTF contain a macro or virus that gets carried into the PDF?
RTF has no macro language of its own — that absence is precisely why plenty of organisations standardised on it for circulating documents. It can wrap embedded objects, and those have been abused historically, but nothing of that kind is executed here or written into the output. The PDF you receive is pages, fonts and images.
What is this going to cost me?
Nothing. There is no account, no trial, and no mark added to the pages you get back — the PDF is yours to send on as it is. The ceiling is 100 MB per file, a limit that bites sooner with RTF than with most formats given how much room those hex-encoded pictures take up.