Convert HTML to Rich Text
Free online converter for HTML files. Portable formatted text interchange format. Nothing to install, no watermark, and every file is deleted automatically.
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Upload a HTML file to convert it to Rich Text. Up to 3 files at once, 100 MB each.
Free · up to 3 files · 100 MB each · files deleted automatically after 1 hour.
About HTML and RTF
HTML .html
The markup language of the web: text wrapped in tags that describe structure, which a browser then renders.
Good for
- Opens in any browser on any device
- Structural and accessible when written properly
- Styleable, linkable and searchable
Trade-offs
- Appearance depends on the renderer and its stylesheet
- Images and styles usually live outside the file
- No fixed pagination — awkward to print predictably
text/html
Rich Text .rtf
Rich Text Format: formatted text stored as readable plain text markup. A lowest common denominator that almost every word processor understands.
Good for
- Opens in essentially any word processor, on any platform
- Keeps basic formatting where plain text cannot
- Human-readable if you open it in an editor
Trade-offs
- Much larger than DOCX for the same content
- No modern layout features
- Images balloon the file size
application/rtf
HTML and RTF side by side
| HTML | RTF | |
|---|---|---|
| Compression | Plain text markup | Plain text markup |
| Animation | Yes — via CSS | No |
| Typically used for | Web pages, email templates, exported reports | Exchange between unlike word processors |
What changes when you convert HTML to RTF
A page that reflows becomes one that does not
HTML describes a document that adapts to whatever window it is opened in; RTF describes fixed pages of a fixed width. The converter has to choose a page size and commit the layout to it, so anything that depended on the width of the viewport is resolved to a single answer. Styling is approximated as closely as the target allows, and scripts are not run — whatever a page would have generated after loading is simply not in the file.
Remote images are not downloaded
Images referenced by URL rather than embedded in the file are not fetched during conversion. That is a deliberate boundary: a converter that loaded remote resources would be making requests on your behalf, from our servers, to addresses inside a file we did not write. Anything linked externally will be missing from the result.
Rendered by LibreOffice
The conversion runs through headless LibreOffice — the same engine behind the desktop suite. Fonts are the thing to watch: the document is typeset with what the server has available, and a substituted typeface rarely occupies exactly the same width as the one it replaces, so line breaks can fall differently than they would on your machine.
Read as UTF-8
A HTML is a text file, and a text file does not record which encoding it uses — that is the one thing the format cannot tell you about itself. We read it as UTF-8, which is right for essentially anything produced this decade. A file saved long ago in a regional encoding can arrive with accented characters mangled, and the fix is to re-save it as UTF-8 before converting rather than after. Tabs and spaces used to line columns up will also shift once the text is set in a proportional typeface.