How to convert RTF to Markdown
Pull a Rich Text Format document into clean Markdown — what converts, what RTF control codes get stripped, and why it beats copy-pasting formatted text.
RTF files are full of control codes — behind that tidy letter is a thicket of \b, \fs24, and font tables. RTF to Markdown reads that markup in your browser and gives you back clean Markdown, keeping the formatting that matters and discarding the machinery.
What converts
RTF encodes basic rich text, and those constructs map onto Markdown:
- Bold and italic runs →
**bold**,*italic* - Larger/bold heading lines →
#headings (best-effort, from styling cues) - Bulleted and numbered lists → Markdown lists
- Paragraphs → clean paragraph breaks
What gets stripped
Everything that's pure presentation or RTF plumbing is removed:
- Font tables, color tables, and point sizes.
- Control words (
\par,\tab, and friends). - Exact spacing and positioning.
You're left with the content and its structure — which is the whole reason to convert.
Why not just copy-paste?
Copy-pasting formatted text into a Markdown editor usually fails one of two ways: either you get plain text with all formatting lost, or you get a paste that smuggles in hidden styling. Converting the RTF directly is deterministic — bold becomes **bold**, a list becomes a list — so you can trust the result and edit it as plain text.
Where it helps
- Rescuing old documents stored as
.rtfinto a modern, version-controllable format. - Importing notes exported from apps that only offer RTF.
- Cleaning rich text down to portable Markdown before pasting it elsewhere.
Privacy
Parsing is local — the file never leaves your browser, so it's safe for personal and internal documents.
Convert the RTF, do a quick heading pass, and your document is clean Markdown. To go the other way, Markdown to RTF exports rich text that opens anywhere.