RTF is rich text that almost every word processor ever written can open. TXT is plain text, with no markup of any kind. pandoc sits between the two, and this page says exactly what happens to an RTF file on the way to becoming a TXT one.
What runs when an RTF file becomes TXT
pandoc in two passes, on a machine we rent and watch. Your RTF file is uploaded once, pandoc runs once, the TXT comes back, and neither file is kept. RTF to TXT is one of the 3649 pairs that engine was probed on with a real file, which is why it has a page here and why the pairs the probe could not prove do not.
What survives from the RTF into the TXT
Lists from the RTF file, nesting included, plus code blocks, block quotes and links, all re-expressed in TXT.
Images: pandoc extracts them out of the RTF file into a working directory and re-embeds them in the TXT, so nothing ends up pointing at a file that no longer exists.
What RTF to TXT costs you
Tables. The TXT writer cannot carry one, and the probe caught this the hard way: a CSV file, which is nothing but a table, came back as a well formed and completely empty TXT with a zero return code. The engine now refuses that case outright rather than handing you the emptiness.
Where RTF and TXT files come from
RTF. Almost everything can write it, and that is the point: an RTF is plain text you can open in a text editor and read. It was the interchange format before there was an open standard, and it survives in exports from software too old or too small to ship anything better.
If a model is going to read the TXT
Structure is what survives from the RTF file, and structure is what a model needs. RTF in, TXT out, with the heading tree intact instead of flattened into one long paragraph.
RTF to TXT, measured rather than promised
Running RTF to TXT against the real engine with a real file, pandoc wrote 263 bytes of TXT in under a tenth of a second, machine otherwise idle. That is one RTF file on one day and not an average, which is why the number is given together with the file that produced it.
The RTF to TXT verdict was reached by reading the text back, meaning the output decodes as readable text and still carries the witness word, which is the only check a plain text target allows. Which check was used matters, because they do not all prove the same thing, and a status code of 200 proves nothing whatsoever about whether the TXT file has anything inside it.
The same RTF file, sent somewhere else
Other outputs the probe measured out of an RTF file, so the cost of choosing TXT can be read against something. Sizes do not compare across engines, because each family was probed with its own RTF witness file.
RTF to PDF: 11,917 bytes in 1.1 seconds, verified by a format signature.
RTF to MD: 265 bytes in under a tenth of a second, verified by a pandoc round trip.
RTF to DOCX: 5,422 bytes in 1.1 seconds, verified by a format signature.
RTF to EPUB: 5,033 bytes in 0.1 seconds, verified by a pandoc round trip.
RTF to HTML: 3,985 bytes in 0.1 seconds, verified by a pandoc round trip.
RTF to ODT: 12,670 bytes in 1.2 seconds, verified by reading the internal type and finding a witness word.
Other ways into TXT, and what they measured
Among the published routes into TXT, RTF is the seventh largest output of the 11 measured. The witness files differ, so this ranks the probe run and not your document.
DOCX to TXT: 264 bytes in 0.1 seconds.
PDF to TXT: 219 bytes in 0.8 seconds.
DOC to TXT: 268 bytes in 1.1 seconds.
AZW3 to TXT: 219 bytes in 0.6 seconds.
CSV to TXT: 114 bytes in under a tenth of a second.
What we will not pretend about RTF to TXT
An RTF file over 25 MB is refused before the upload finishes rather than after it, so you do not wait for a rejection.
An RTF to TXT run that passes 60 seconds is killed, and the pandoc process is killed with it. A run left behind would sit on one of the machine's two cores until somebody noticed.
32 of the 935 pairs probed in the family that serves RTF to TXT failed, and this pair is not one of them. They fail for reasons worth knowing: a writer that cannot carry what the document is made of, or output the engine could not read back. They are counted here rather than hidden, because a pair that fails quietly is worse than one that fails loudly.
pandoc never writes the TXT through a TeX engine here, and it never writes PDF at all: the eleven engines it would need are not on this machine and a TeX distribution weighs several gigabytes. Anyone who wants a PDF out of an RTF file goes through LibreOffice or calibre, both of which genuinely can.
One RTF file at a time, chosen in the browser. There is nothing else to set up and nothing else on offer.
RTF to TXT: what people ask
What actually converts my RTF file to TXT?
pandoc does it, in two passes, on a machine we rent and watch. Not a browser trick and not somebody else service: the RTF file is uploaded once, pandoc runs once, the TXT comes back, and neither file is kept afterwards.
How long does RTF to TXT take?
On the file the probe used, pandoc took under a tenth of a second and wrote 263 bytes of TXT. That is one real measurement on one real RTF file, not an average and not a promise about yours: a larger RTF takes longer, and past 60 seconds the run is stopped.
What do I lose going from RTF to TXT?
The one to know about first: Tables. The TXT writer cannot carry one, and the probe caught this the hard way: a CSV file, which is nothing but a table, came back as a well formed and completely empty TXT with a zero return code. The engine now refuses that case outright rather than handing you the emptiness.
Are the tables in my RTF file still tables in the TXT?
No, and that is a property of TXT rather than a defect of this path. TXT cannot hold a table, so an RTF file built around one is the wrong candidate for this pair.
Is RTF to TXT free?
There is a free allowance every month, and one RTF to TXT conversion costs half a credit against it. When the allowance runs out the tool says so and stops, rather than quietly handing you a worse TXT.