In its original conception, the .rtf format was a specification for formatting text and graphics principally designed to facilitate the interoperability of documents and text between Microsoft document processing applications. It eliminated the need for specialized translation software required to open documents in different versions of MS-DOS, Windows, and Macintosh. The specification is a proprietary filename format first developed by Microsoft in 1987 to be supported in Microsoft word 3.0 and all versions of Microsoft Office Word thereof. The latest revision, version 1.9.1, was released in 2008 and also marked the end of any further enhancements to the specification by Microsoft. Through unformatted text, control words, control symbols, and groups, a piece of text can be encoded into an .rtf format. All RTF readers then process .rtf formats by separating and acting on control information disparately from the actual text in the document. Though the RTF specification is proprietary asset of Microsoft, several non-Microsoft programs support both reading .rtf documents and creating .rtf. Microsoft Office Suite is still however the most dominant application associated with this specification.
From the 70's to 2007 the open source .txt filename extension format commonly referred to plain text documents encoded using the ASCII character set. To support internationalization and localization, .txt text documents are today text files encoded using the UTF-8 or UTF-16LE standard which is a superset of the ASCII character set. Text documents of type .txt typically have minimal formatting for example no support for bold or italic characters or support for bullet points etc. This allows .txt documents to use minimum storage space and be platform independent as long as the operating system supports the underlying encoding character set used to create the .txt document. On windows .txt file support has existed since 1985 when Windows 1.0 was released and since then has been mostly associated with the notepad application on Microsoft Windows.
FreeFileConvert uses tuned encoding for RTF to TXT conversions, preserving clarity while trimming file size. Finished audio streams instantly across phones, tablets, desktops, and modern browsers without extra tweaks.
Upload RTF files from desktop, tablet, or cloud storage, queue multiple jobs, and let the converter finish autonomously. Return whenever convenient to download synchronized TXT results on any device you rely on.
Process up to 5 files sized 1000 MB per batch without splitting queues manually. Mixed-format uploads convert together, producing consistent TXT audio with dependable progress tracking.
Extended ASCII, PC-8, and ANSI are among the original character control sets used in the formatting and text representation of documents saved in the .rtf format. At present the format supports 7-bit ASCII characters. This formally allows the easy transfer of text documents between different computers running different operating systems and applications. RTF requires minimal computer resources and does not support macros. It does however have support for embedding some of the popular graphical format such as JPEG and PNG. Not all applications have support for these embedded graphical format thus .rtf files with unsupported embedded graphical images will open but will not display the graphical images.
Unicode (UTF-8 or UTF-16LE) is the defacto character encoding set for .txt files. It is supported by all major operating systems, with many having native applications that can open .txt documents.
Upload your document file in the RTF format from your device, Dropbox, or Google Drive.
Select TXT as the output format and click Convert. Adjust optional settings if needed.
Download the converted document file. Each file stays available for up to 5 downloads.