About RTF to PDF

Add one .rtf file or up to 20 at once and each is rendered into a PDF with selectable, searchable text. Bold, italics, underline, strikethrough, superscript and subscript, font size, text and highlight colour, serif or sans-serif font choice, paragraph alignment, left and first-line indents, paragraph spacing, tab stops, bullets, tables, embedded PNG and JPEG pictures, hyperlinks and explicit page breaks all survive the trip. You can keep the page dimensions recorded in the RTF or force US Letter or A4, and you can merge a whole batch into one PDF instead of getting one file per document.

One thing is out of scope: pictures stored as a Windows metafile (WMF or EMF), the vector format old Office builds used for charts and clip art. Those are a whole drawing language rather than a bitmap, so they are skipped — and the file's row in the list says so, instead of leaving you to spot the gap yourself.

RTF is not a binary format — it is plain text made of nested groups and backslash control words. The conversion runs in three passes, all inside your browser tab:

1. Parse. The file is read as a byte stream and walked character by character, maintaining a stack of formatting states — one push per { group. The font and colour tables are collected, Unicode escapes (\u) are decoded, and legacy single-byte escapes (\'hh) are mapped through the codepage the document declares — cp1252 for Western European text, cp1251 for Cyrillic.
2. Typeset. The resulting paragraphs, tables and styled text runs are laid out: each line is filled word by word against the measured width of the actual font, tab stops are resolved, alignment and justification are applied, table rows that outgrow the page continue on the next one, and pages break when the next line would cross the bottom margin.
3. Write. The laid-out pages are written to a real PDF with pdf-lib. Text that fits the WinAnsi character set uses the fonts every PDF reader already ships with, which is why a one-page Latin letter comes out around 5 KB; anything beyond it — Cyrillic, Greek — embeds a subset of Noto Serif or Noto Sans instead. Either way the text stays selectable and searchable rather than being flattened into an image.

No server is involved in any of it. The parser, the layout engine and the PDF writer are all JavaScript running on your device, using the standard File and Blob APIs to read your document and hand back a download.

Your documents are never uploaded. Every step above happens locally — no text, filename or byte of your file is sent to a server, logged or stored by RTF to PDF. There is no upload endpoint to send it to.

Because nothing is transmitted, the converter keeps working with the network disconnected once this page has loaded. When you close the tab, navigate away, or press Start over, the in-memory copies of your RTF and the generated PDF are released. The tool writes nothing to storage on your device, so no trace of a converted document survives to your next visit.

This covers what RTF to PDF does with your files, which is nothing beyond converting them for you to download. It does not change what a browser extension, a network proxy, or the device itself might otherwise be able to see.