Convert HTML to RTF
RTF is unusual among document formats in being plain text you can open in a text editor and read. Bold is a visible control word, not a byte in a binary structure. That transparency is why it survives as the interchange format of last resort: mail clients, ancient word processors, legal document systems and clipboard exchanges all understand it when they understand nothing else.
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What it does
- Bold, italic, headings, lists and tables survive as RTF control words
- The file is plain text and can be inspected in any editor
- Opens in Word, LibreOffice, WordPad, TextEdit and most mail clients
How to use HTML to RTF
- 1
Upload the HTML
A page, an article or a fragment. RTF has no concept of a document head, so a fragment converts just as well as a full page.
- 2
Formatting becomes control words
Emphasis, headings, lists and tables are emitted as RTF markup. You can open the result in a text editor and see exactly what was written.
- 3
Test in the destination
RTF support varies more than you would expect. WordPad ignores things Word honors, and mail clients differ again. Open it where it is going.
How it works
The HTML is parsed and re-emitted as RTF control words. RTF describes a document as a stream of instructions inside plain text: a control word switches bold on, another sets a font size, another begins a table row. The converter walks the parsed page and writes the equivalent instruction stream.
Because the output is text, the result is unusually easy to verify. Open it in any editor and the structure is visible, which is not true of a binary document format.
The one thing RTF is unmatched at
Being readable by something you did not plan for. A recipient on an unknown platform, a system from the 1990s, a mail client that strips attachments it does not recognize: RTF gets through more of these than any other formatted document format, which is why it persists long after it stopped being anyone's first choice.
What does not survive
CSS layout, in all its forms. Columns, grids, floats, positioned elements, background images and anything sized relative to the viewport have no RTF expression, so the content arrives as a single flow in source order with its character formatting intact.
Scripts and interactive elements are dropped entirely, which is part of why some systems prefer RTF: there is far less that can hide in it.
Choosing between RTF and DOCX
If the recipient is on modern software, choose DOCX. It is smaller, more capable and better supported. Choose RTF when you do not know what will open the file, when the receiving system explicitly asks for it, or when something downstream needs to read or generate the document with a script rather than a document library.
The most conservative target available
RTF asks for less than any other document format on this site. It is plain text with control words, so a page converted into one is reduced to headings, paragraphs, lists, basic character formatting and little else.
That is exactly why you would choose it. An RTF opens in word processors going
back to the late 1980s, in legal document systems, and in institutional software
that has never been updated — the situations where you cannot rely on .docx or
ODT being understood.
If the destination is a normal, current word processor, ODT or DOCX will preserve more and produce a smaller file. Reach for RTF when the destination is unknown or genuinely old.
Examples
A formatted notice for a legal case system
Legal and case management systems often standardize on RTF because it is text, so it diffs, greps and audits in a way a binary document does not. Everything structural in the notice comes across.
An email template with a background image
RTF has no background images, so it is dropped rather than approximated. The table and its text survive. If the design matters, send HTML mail or a PDF instead.
Frequently asked questions
What can RTF hold that plain text cannot?
Character formatting and document structure: bold, italic, underline, fonts, sizes, colors, paragraph alignment, lists, tables and embedded images. What it cannot hold is layout in the CSS sense. There are no columns, no floats, no positioning and no stylesheets, so a page whose meaning depends on where elements sit will arrive as a single flow of formatted text.
Why is RTF still used at all?
Because it is text, and that turns out to matter. An RTF file can be inspected, searched, diffed and generated by a script without a document library, and it opens in essentially every editor written in the last thirty years. Systems that must archive documents for decades, or exchange them between organizations running different software, keep choosing it for exactly those reasons.
Will the RTF be larger than the HTML?
Often, yes. RTF is verbose: every formatting change is spelled out as a control word, and any embedded image is encoded as hexadecimal text, which roughly doubles its size. A page that was thirty kilobytes of HTML with a linked image can become several hundred kilobytes of RTF once that image is embedded. The trade is self-containment, since the RTF carries its images inside it.