A format that refuses to die, for good reasons
Rich Text Format is nearly forty years old and still turns up constantly, because it solves a problem nothing else quite does: it carries basic formatting in a file that is fundamentally plain text, readable by almost any word processor ever written, on any platform.
That makes it the safe export option for systems that cannot assume what the recipient runs — case management software, older accounting packages, government forms, WordPad on Windows and TextEdit on Mac. The result is a file people are handed regularly and cannot always open conveniently, which is where converting to PDF helps.
How it is read
Because RTF is a control language rather than a binary container, it can be parsed directly in the browser without a conversion library. The reader walks the file's nested groups, tracks bold and italic state, decodes its character escapes and Unicode runs, and skips the sections that hold metadata rather than document text — font tables, colour tables, stylesheets, embedded objects.
Unrecognised control words are ignored, which is the format's own rule: readers are expected to skip what they do not understand rather than fail. That is what lets a partial reader handle real-world files written by a dozen different programs.
What you get, and what you do not
Kept: the text, its paragraph structure, bold and italic runs, and any explicit page breaks the file contains.
Not kept: fonts and colours, tables, embedded images, headers, footers and footnotes. If your document leans on those, the better route is to open it in Word or LibreOffice, save as .docx, and use the Word to PDF tool — that path carries tables and pictures.
Common uses
- Turning an RTF export from a legacy system into a shareable PDF
- Sending a WordPad or TextEdit document to someone without Word
- Filing a document where only PDF is accepted
- Freezing a draft so it cannot be edited by accident
Privacy
Everything happens on your device. The RTF is parsed in the tab and the PDF is assembled in memory — nothing is uploaded, stored or logged.