How much of an RTF document survives as a PDF
Rich Text Format is what WordPad and TextEdit save unless told otherwise, and it is how letters, notes and exported documents often sit in an archive for years. Opening one needs a word processor; a PDF opens on anything. This tool reads the RTF itself and sets its words as fresh pages, keeping the structure of the writing rather than the look of the original page.
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Which tool you need
Letters, notes or a draft where the words are what matter
This tool. The paragraphs, emphasis, headings, lists, links and PNG or JPEG pictures come through, set in a clean typeface on the page size you pick.
A document whose exact layout matters, such as a designed flyer or a form
Open it in the program that made it and use its own Save as PDF or Print to PDF, which draws the page the way that program lays it out.
A plain .txt file, with no formatting to keep
Text to PDF keeps every line break and indent of a plain file exactly where it was typed.
A saved email rather than a document
EML to PDF reads the message's sender, date and subject as well as its body, and lists what was attached.
A reading copy, not a facsimile
An RTF file describes a page in its writer's own terms: a font chosen from the fonts on that computer, sizes, colors, indents, columns, headers and footers. Copying all of that faithfully would mean rebuilding a word processor in the browser, and getting it partly wrong would be worse than not trying.
So this tool reads what the writing is made of and leaves the styling behind. Bold, italic and struck-through words stay so; underlining does not. The text is set in Sans or Monospaced on an A4, Letter or Legal page, with your choice of margins, and nothing is uploaded to do it.
Headings, lists and tables
A heading comes out as a heading when the document marks it as one, through a heading or Title style or an outline level. Text that was only made large and bold by hand reads as an ordinary paragraph in bold. Lists keep their bullets and numbers from the markers that Word and LibreOffice write beside each item.
A table keeps every cell's words but loses its grid: each row becomes one line of text. For a document built around tables, the program that wrote it will give a truer PDF.
Other languages and older files
RTF files from word processors record which character set their text is in, so accented letters, Cyrillic, Greek and other scripts are read as written. Whether each one can be drawn depends on the Fonts setting; a character beyond the chosen level is shown as a replacement mark, and the result counts them.
What to know before you start
- The original fonts, sizes, colors, alignment, columns and margins are not kept.
- Headers, footers, footnotes and comments are dropped.
- Windows metafile pictures and embedded objects are left out and counted.
- Word documents in .doc or .docx are not read here.
- One document at a time, from a file of up to 128 MB.