Is formatting like bold, fonts, and colors preserved?

No — the conversion extracts the document's text and flattens styling. Paragraphs, line breaks, and tabs survive; visual formatting doesn't. If the formatting itself matters, open the RTF in LibreOffice or Word and export to PDF from there.

What about images or objects embedded in the RTF?

Embedded pictures and OLE objects are skipped entirely — they're stored as encoded blobs inside the RTF and aren't rendered. The output contains the document's text only.

Will special characters like smart quotes and accents come through?

Yes — RTF encodes these as escape sequences, and the converter decodes both the classic Windows-1252 escapes and Unicode escapes correctly, so 'curly quotes', em dashes, and accented Latin characters all render properly.

Why did a document in another language fail?

The text is decoded fully, but the PDF's built-in fonts can render Latin scripts only. An RTF containing Cyrillic, CJK, or Arabic text stops with a clear unsupported-characters message instead of producing wrong output.

RTF → PDF

Convert Rich Text Format files to PDF. Processed entirely in your browser.

Drop image files here or browse

Max 20MB per file

About RTF to PDF

RTF files keep turning up long after the format's heyday: exports from legacy business systems, old WordPad documents, court and government filings, attachments from ancient email archives. Modern workflows want PDF, and opening a word processor just to re-save a file gets old quickly.

Convertora reads the RTF directly in your browser and converts its text content to PDF. RTF is a plain-text format full of control codes ({\rtf1, \par, \fonttbl...); the converter strips the markup machinery, decodes the special character escapes that RTF uses for things like smart quotes and accented letters, preserves paragraph and line breaks, and renders the resulting text onto A4 pages. It's a text-out conversion: what the document says survives; bold, fonts, colors, and embedded objects are flattened away.

How to use it

1Upload an .rtf file (up to 20MB).
2The RTF markup is parsed locally: metadata groups (font tables, color tables, embedded images) are skipped, paragraph and tab controls become real line breaks and tabs, and escaped characters — including Windows-1252 and Unicode escapes — are decoded to proper text.
3The cleaned text is typeset in a fixed-width font on A4 pages, with line breaks preserved.
4The PDF downloads with the same base name as the RTF.

Common use cases

Converting exports from legacy CRM, ERP, or case-management systems into shareable PDFs.
Modernizing old WordPad and early-Word documents for archiving.
Processing RTF email attachments on a machine without Word or LibreOffice.
Locking the content of an RTF into a fixed format before distribution.

Frequently asked questions

Tips

Files saved as 'RTF' by Word occasionally carry a misleading MIME type — the tool accepts them by file extension, so just upload the .rtf as-is.
For modern .docx files, use Word to PDF instead — it preserves headings, lists, and tables rather than flattening to plain text.

100% private — runs in your browser

Convertora processes everything on your device using JavaScript and WebAssembly. Files never leave your browser, are never uploaded to a server, and are never seen by us or anyone else. The moment you close the tab, the data is gone — there is no temporary cloud copy, no log entry, no retained backup.

Because the work happens locally, processing speed depends on your device — but there are no rate limits, no daily caps, and no file size restrictions beyond what your browser can handle in memory. No signup, no account, no payment. The tool works the same in incognito mode, on a corporate network, or after the page has loaded once, even with the network disconnected.