RTF to Markdown
An RTF from TextEdit, WordPad or an old Word save, turned into markdown. The formatting that means something is kept and the printer settings are not.
The result appears here as you type.
How it works
- The file is read as text, because RTF is text: control words, groups and the words between them.
- Bold and italic become markdown emphasis, and they end where their group ends, which is how RTF scopes formatting.
- Paragraph breaks become blank lines, bullets become list items, and escaped characters come back as themselves.
- The font table, colour table, stylesheet and any embedded object are dropped rather than printed, which is what an RTF is mostly made of.
What it does not do
- Tables come through as their text, without the columns. RTF describes a table as a series of cell boundaries rather than as rows, and reconstructing that reliably is a different project.
- Images are dropped. They sit in the file as hexadecimal and there is nowhere for them to go in a markdown file.
- Headings are guesswork in RTF: it has no heading styles, only larger bold text, so they arrive as bold paragraphs rather than as hashes.
Questions
Is my file uploaded?
No. The conversion runs in your browser with code that is already part of this page. There is no upload endpoint on this site, so the file cannot reach us even in principle. Open your browser's network tab and watch: no request carries your document.
It says my file is not RTF.
An RTF file starts with the characters {\rtf. If yours does not, it is probably a .doc or .docx that was renamed. Open it in Word and save as RTF, or use the Word converter.
Why are my headings just bold text?
Because that is all they were. RTF has no heading styles: a heading in an RTF is a paragraph that happens to be larger and bold. Nothing in the file says it is a heading.
Related tools
Converting more than one file
Not released yetThis page converts the file in front of you, and it always will. The app works on the folder: point it at a directory and convert everything in it at once, offline, without a browser in the way.
For iPhone, iPad and Mac. It is not in the App Store, so there is nothing to download from this page yet.Digital Sandbox, who are building it →