RTF Viewer

Paste RTF source or load an .rtf file and read it as formatted text instead of a tangle of \control words and braces. The parser walks the RTF groups, honors bold, italic, underline, paragraph and line breaks, decodes \'hh hex bytes and \uN Unicode escapes, and skips the font, color, stylesheet, and metadata tables that clutter the raw markup. Switch between a formatted preview and a clean plain-text extraction. It handles common RTF produced by word processors, not every exotic feature, and runs entirely in your browser, so the document is never uploaded.

How to use the RTF Viewer

Paste RTF source into the box or load an .rtf file. RTF is plain text under the hood — it always begins with {\rtf1 — so you can copy it straight out of a file and drop it in. The decoded result appears below, and a row and character summary tells you roughly how much text was recovered. Use the View selector to switch between a Formatted preview, which keeps bold, italic, underline, and paragraph breaks, and a Plain text extraction with all formatting stripped, ready to copy into somewhere that wants clean text.

Press Example to load a small RTF snippet that exercises bold, italics, an accented character, and paragraph breaks. The parser deliberately ignores the bulky control tables that RTF carries — fonts, colors, stylesheets, and document metadata — and skips destinations marked with \* that hold data rather than visible text, so what you see is the readable content rather than the machinery. Documents that lean on embedded objects, images, or unusual extensions may not round-trip perfectly, but everyday RTF from word processors converts cleanly.

What is RTF?

RTF, the Rich Text Format, is a document format Microsoft introduced in 1987 as a portable way to move formatted text between applications. Unlike a binary .doc file, an RTF document is plain ASCII text: open one in a text editor and you can read it. Formatting is expressed with control words — backslash-prefixed tokens like \\b for bold, \\i for italic, \\par for a new paragraph — and structure is organized into groups delimited by curly braces { }. A group can nest inside another, and control words inside a group apply only within it, which is how RTF scopes formatting. This human-readable, text-based design is exactly why RTF has stayed useful for so long.

A few mechanisms do the heavy lifting. Characters outside plain ASCII are encoded as escapes: \\'hh represents a single byte by its two-digit hex value in the document's code page, and \\uN gives a Unicode code point as a signed number, usually followed by a fallback character that older readers display instead. Control words can take a numeric parameter, as in \\fs24 for a 12-point font size (RTF measures font size in half-points). Several leading groups describe resources rather than content — the font table, the color table, the stylesheet, and an info group with title and author — and a destination beginning with \\* marks data that a reader which does not understand it should skip entirely. A parser that wants the visible text walks the group tree, applies the formatting control words it recognizes, decodes the character escapes, and ignores those resource tables and unknown destinations. That is the approach this viewer takes.

RTF persists for a simple reason: it is the lowest common denominator for rich text. Almost every word processor, on every platform, can open and save it, and the operating-system clipboard often uses RTF to carry formatting when you copy styled text between applications, which is why a paste from a browser into a document frequently keeps its bold and links. Modern editors have largely moved to ZIP-based XML formats like .docx, which handle images, tracked changes, and complex layout far better, and HTML covers rich text on the web. But for plain interchange of formatted text — a quick cross-application paste, a document that must open anywhere — RTF remains a dependable fallback. This viewer covers the common control words that everyday documents use; it is not a full RTF reader, so files built around embedded objects or rare extensions may not convert completely.

Common use cases

• Reading an RTF without an editor. Preview a .rtf file's content quickly in the browser.
• Extracting plain text. Strip all formatting to get clean text you can paste anywhere.
• Inspecting clipboard or export output. Check what an application actually wrote into an RTF.
• Recovering content. Pull the readable text out of an RTF when you do not have the original app.
• Private review. Read a document locally instead of uploading it to an online converter.