RTF to Markdown
BetaDrop a legacy .rtf file and get Markdown back. Bold, italic, lists and links are carried over; nothing is uploaded and no desktop office suite is needed.
- Free, no sign-up
- REST + MCP
- Updated
- Reviewed by Olgun Ozoktas
.rtf only · up to 10 MB · one file at a time
- Runs in your browser
- Nothing is uploaded
The file is read in this tab. It is never uploaded, and nothing is stored after you close the page.
Your Markdown will appear here
What this converter does not carry over
RTF keeps these things, this converter does not read them. Nothing is guessed and nothing is left as a broken placeholder — they are simply absent from the Markdown.
- Images
- Pictures and embedded objects are dropped. There is no link left behind, because the bytes live inside the .rtf and there is nowhere to put them.
- Tables
- The grid is not rebuilt. Cell text arrives as ordinary paragraphs in reading order, not as a Markdown table.
- Headers and footers
- Running headers, footers and page numbers are skipped, along with footnotes and comments.
- What does come through
- Headings, paragraphs, bold, italic, strikethrough, bulleted and numbered lists, hyperlinks, and accented or non-Latin characters.
How to convert an RTF file to Markdown
-
Drop the file
Drag an .rtf file onto the drop area, or click to choose one. It is read in your browser with the File API. -
Or paste the source
If you have the RTF markup itself rather than a file, switch to the paste box and paste it, starting from {\rtf1. -
Read the result
The Markdown appears with bold, italic, strikethrough, lists and links converted, and a count of the blocks produced. -
Copy or download
Copy the Markdown, or download it as an .md file named after the file you dropped.
Common uses
Getting old notes into a modern editor
Rescuing an RTF email export
Moving legacy documentation into a repo
Reading an .rtf without an office suite
Why convert RTF to Markdown?
RTF to Markdown converts a Rich Text Format document into Markdown in your browser. RTF is a text format: a document is a tree of brace-delimited groups carrying control words like \par for a paragraph and \b for bold, plus the escapes that encode any character outside plain ASCII. Reading it means walking that stream and keeping track of which formatting is in force, which is work a browser can do without help.
The converter carries over paragraphs, bold, italic, strikethrough, bulleted and numbered lists with their nesting level, and hyperlink fields, which become ordinary Markdown links. Unicode escapes and Windows-1252 code-page escapes are decoded, so smart quotes, dashes and accented characters survive rather than turning into stray symbols. Characters that would change the structure of the Markdown, such as an asterisk in the original text, are escaped so they stay literal.
What it does not do is worth being plain about, because a converter that quietly drops half a document is worse than one that says so. Images are not extracted. Tables are not reconstructed. Headers, footers and footnotes are skipped along with the font, colour and style tables. Underline is dropped because Markdown has no underline. If the file is mostly a table or mostly pictures, very little will come out, and the tool will say that it found no readable text rather than handing back an empty file.
The same conversion is available as a REST endpoint and an MCP tool for converting a batch from a script.
How it compares
The usual route is a round trip through a desktop office suite: open the .rtf in Word or LibreOffice, save it as .docx, then run a DOCX converter. That works, and it is three steps and an install for a file that is already text.
The other route is one of the upload-and-convert sites, which do the same string work on someone else's server with your document. Old RTF files tend to be exactly the documents worth not uploading — contracts, letters, internal procedures, archived correspondence — so the version that never sends the bytes anywhere is the one to prefer.
FindUtils already converts the other two classic rich-text formats: DOCX to Markdown for Word's current package and ODT to Markdown for LibreOffice's. RTF was the remaining one.
Tips
- An .rtf file is plain text. Opening one in a code editor shows braces and backslash control words — that is what this tool reads.
- A binary .doc is not RTF, despite the similar age. The converter refuses it and tells you to save the file as .rtf or .docx first.
- Bullet and numbered lists are detected from the list markers Word and WordPad write, so a hand-indented list of dashes stays plain text.
- Headings are only produced when the document records an outline level for the paragraph. Many simple RTF files carry no outline information at all, so their headings arrive as ordinary paragraphs.
- Characters written as code-page escapes decode as Windows-1252, which is what the overwhelming majority of RTF files declare. Files declaring another code page may mis-map a handful of accented characters.
- Have a .docx or an .odt instead? Use DOCX to Markdown or ODT to Markdown, which read those packages directly.