Convert Plain Text to Rich Text
Free online converter for Plain Text files. Portable formatted text interchange format. Nothing to install, no watermark, and every file is deleted automatically.
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Upload a Plain Text 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 TXT and RTF
Plain Text .txt
Just characters. No fonts, no sizes, no layout — which is exactly why it will still open, unchanged, in fifty years.
Good for
- Universally readable, now and indefinitely
- Tiny, and works with every text tool ever written
- Nothing hidden — what you see is the whole file
Trade-offs
- No formatting, images or structure whatsoever
- Character encoding must be right or accents break
- Line endings differ between Windows and everything else
text/plain
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
TXT and RTF side by side
| TXT | RTF | |
|---|---|---|
| Compression | None | Plain text markup |
| Animation | No | No |
| Typically used for | Notes, logs, source data, long-term archives | Exchange between unlike word processors |
What changes when you convert TXT to RTF
It becomes editable, not formatted
The result is a genuine RTF you can open and edit in a word processor — but a text file carries no formatting to bring with it, so what you get is your text in a default typeface with default margins. Headings, styles and structure are yours to add afterwards. Nothing in a TXT tells the converter which line was meant to be a title.
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 TXT 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.
Other Plain Text conversions
Other ways to get Rich Text
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