How to Convert PDF to RTF — 4 Free Ways to Get Editable Text

LibreOffice is the most reliable free option for PDF-to-RTF conversion on the desktop. Its Draw module can open a PDF, make it editable, and then save it as RTF through Writer.

1. Open LibreOffice Draw and go to File > Open. Select your PDF. Draw imports each page as an editable layout.
2. Select all content on the page (Ctrl + A), copy it, and paste it into a new LibreOffice Writer document.
3. In Writer, go to File > Save As and choose Rich Text Format (.rtf) from the format dropdown.

What works well: text, basic tables, and simple formatting usually come through intact. LibreOffice handles multi-page PDFs and preserves font styles.

Limitations: complex layouts with columns, text boxes, or layered graphics often shift. Scanned PDFs (image-only) will not produce editable text — you need OCR for those (see below).

Word 2013 and later can open PDFs directly and reflow the content into an editable document. From there you can save as RTF.

1. Open Word. Go to File > Open and select your PDF. Word will warn you that it is converting the file — click OK.
2. Review the result. Word does a good job with text-heavy PDFs but may rearrange graphics or table cells.
3. Go to File > Save As and choose Rich Text Format (*.rtf).

If you have a Microsoft 365 subscription, this is probably the quickest desktop method. The free online version of Word (Office.com) does not support opening PDFs, so you need the installed app.

Google Docs can open a PDF and attempt to extract its text. The output is not RTF directly, but you can download it as RTF from the File menu.

1. Upload your PDF to Google Drive.
2. Right-click the file and choose Open with > Google Docs. Docs extracts the text content (images are placed inline where it can).
3. Go to File > Download > Rich Text Format (.rtf).

This works on any device with a browser, including Chromebooks. The trade-off is fidelity: Google Docs strips most of the original layout and rebuilds the document from scratch. Headers, footers, and multi-column layouts are usually lost. For simple, single-column text documents, it works fine.

Several free websites offer PDF-to-RTF conversion — Zamzar, CloudConvert, and ILovePDF are commonly used. The workflow is always the same: upload your PDF, pick RTF as the output format, wait for the server to process it, and download.

Privacy consideration: your file is uploaded to a third-party server. If the PDF contains sensitive data (contracts, medical records, financial documents), the desktop methods above are safer because the file never leaves your machine.

File-size limits: most free tiers cap uploads at 10–100 MB. For large PDFs, LibreOffice or Word is more practical.

PDF and RTF store content in fundamentally different ways. An RTF file is structured like a word-processor document: paragraphs, character styles, page margins. A PDF, by contrast, stores positioned glyphs — individual characters placed at exact x/y coordinates on a page. There are no “paragraphs” in a PDF, just clusters of letters that happen to sit near each other.

Every converter has to reverse-engineer the document structure from those glyph positions: figure out where one paragraph ends and the next begins, reconstruct table cells from drawn lines, and guess which font style maps to bold vs. regular. That is why no tool gets it right 100% of the time, especially with complex layouts.

For the best results, start with the cleanest source you have. If you still have the original Word or RTF file that the PDF was generated from, use that instead. If you only have the PDF, expect to spend a few minutes cleaning up the converted output.

A scanned PDF is just a stack of images — there is no text layer to extract. To convert one to RTF you first need OCR (optical character recognition) to turn the images into machine-readable text. Google Docs actually does this automatically when you open a scanned PDF, though accuracy depends on scan quality and font clarity. Adobe Acrobat and ABBYY FineReader are more accurate for OCR but not free.

After OCR produces editable text, you can save or export as RTF using any of the methods above.

Converting RTF to PDF is much simpler because you are going from a structured format to a display format — no guesswork needed. If you have an RTF file you need as a PDF, the free RTF to PDF converter on this site handles it in seconds, right in your browser. No upload, no signup, no watermark. You can also merge multiple RTF files into one PDF or extract plain text from an RTF if that is what you need.

For a full walkthrough with five methods, see the companion guide: How to convert RTF to PDF.