What Is an RTF File? How to Open One and When to Convert It

RTF encodes formatting as backslash control words nested inside curly-brace groups. Here is a complete, valid RTF document:

{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\deff0
{\fonttbl{\f0\froman Times New Roman;}}
{\colortbl ;\red192\green0\blue0;}
\pard\f0\fs24 A normal sentence, then \b bold\b0  and
\cf1 red\cf0  text.\par}

Reading it top to bottom: \rtf1 declares the version, \ansicpg1252 says which codepage the non-ASCII bytes use, then a font table and a colour table declare the resources the body will refer to by number. In the body, \fs24 sets the size in half-points (so, 12pt), \b turns bold on and \b0 turns it off, and \par ends the paragraph.

Everything is ASCII. Accented and Cyrillic characters are escaped — either as \'e9 (a byte in the declared codepage) or as \u233 (a Unicode code point). This is the source of the classic RTF failure mode: a file written with one codepage in mind, opened by an app that assumes another, produces mojibake.

Almost nobody chooses RTF today. You receive it. The usual sources:

• WordPad. RTF was its default save format for decades, so a surprising volume of older Windows documents are .rtf. (WordPad itself was removed from Windows in 2024, which is quietly making this problem worse — the default app for these files is disappearing.)
• Legacy and government systems. Case-management software, court e-filing systems, medical records exports and payroll tools frequently emit RTF because it was the safe interchange choice when they were written.
• Mail merge and report generators. RTF is trivial to generate by string concatenation, so it remains a popular output format for templating engines.
• macOS TextEdit. It saves as RTF by default when you add any formatting to a document.

Most word processors read RTF without any conversion step. On Windows, Microsoft Word opens it directly, and so does the free LibreOffice Writer. On macOS, TextEdit — which ships with the system — handles it natively; double-clicking usually just works. On Android and iOS, Google Docs and Microsoft Word will import an RTF, though formatting fidelity varies.

The awkward cases are the ones people actually search for. A Chromebook has no native RTF viewer. A locked-down work laptop may not let you install LibreOffice. Google Drive will preview an RTF but mangles some layouts. And if you only need to read the thing, installing a word processor is a lot of ceremony.

These three formats are not competitors so much as tools for different jobs, and picking the wrong one is what creates work later.

The short version: RTF is a working format and PDF is a delivery format. An RTF renders slightly differently in Word, LibreOffice and TextEdit — different default fonts, different line breaks, occasionally different pagination. A PDF does not. That is the whole reason the conversion keeps coming up.

Convert when any of these are true:

• An upload form rejects .rtf. Job applications, grant portals and e-filing systems overwhelmingly accept PDF and often nothing else.
• The layout has to hold. A CV that repaginates on the reader's machine is a CV they read differently than you wrote it.
• You are archiving. PDF is a stable target; RTF's rendering depends on which app and which fonts happen to be installed years from now.
• The recipient should not edit it. RTF is trivially editable in any text editor — it is literally plain text.

Keep the RTF if the document is still being worked on, or if the person receiving it needs to change the text.

Worth setting expectations, because “preserves formatting” is doing a lot of work in most converters' marketing.

Survives: bold, italics, underline, strikethrough, superscript and subscript, font sizes, text and highlight colours, the serif/sans/monospace distinction, paragraph alignment and justification, left and first-line indents, spacing above and below paragraphs, tab stops, bullets, tables, hyperlinks, embedded PNG and JPEG pictures, and explicit page breaks. This covers essentially everything in a letter, a CV, a report or a legal filing.

Does not: artwork stored as a Windows metafile. RTF can carry a picture either as a bitmap — a hex-encoded PNG or JPEG, which converts cleanly — or as WMF/EMF, a vector drawing language that older Office builds used for charts and clip art. Replaying that language faithfully in the browser is a project of its own, so this converter skips those pictures and tells you which files contained them, rather than quietly dropping them.

For everything else, an in-browser conversion gives you the same result a server-side LibreOffice would — without handing your document to someone else's machine.

RTF is plain text wearing a formatting costume: portable, ancient, editable anywhere, and rendered slightly differently by every app that opens it. When you need it to look the same for someone else, turn it into a PDF. When you need to keep working on it, leave it alone.