Convert ODT to RTF

The problem this page solves is narrower than it first appears, because a great deal of software reads OpenDocument. Microsoft Word has done for well over a decade and the registry lists it alongside LibreOffice Writer and Google Docs. If the person at the other end has Word, sending the ODT is fine and this conversion is unnecessary.

The case that is left is real and common: a computer with no word processor on it. A locked-down corporate desktop where nothing can be installed and WordPad is what exists. A shared machine in a reception area or a workshop. A Mac where the recipient has never opened anything but TextEdit. A client, a contractor or a member of the public who is not going to install a suite to read one letter. Rich text is the last format that all of those open natively, which is exactly the job RTF has been doing since 1987.

ODT is OASIS work from 2005, standardised as ISO/IEC 26300, and is a ZIP archive containing XML — `content.xml` for the text, `styles.xml` for the styling, a manifest, and the pictures stored as real image files. It is a live format with an active specification and multiple implementations.

RTF is Microsoft, from 1987, and the registry marks it legacy. It is plain text: the prose surrounded by backslash-prefixed control words describing a font table, a colour table, a style sheet and each run of formatting. The specification stopped being developed in 2008, which in this particular context is a feature rather than neglect — a format that will never change again is a format an old viewer can be relied on to keep reading. The conversion is therefore a deliberate step down to reach a wider set of machines.

The list is specific to Writer rather than generic to word processors, and it is worth reading before you convert something complex. Writer’s field model is much richer than RTF’s: user-defined variables, conditional text that shows one thing or another depending on a value, input fields, and document properties inserted into the body all resolve to their current values and stop being fields. Sections linked to an external file — a shared boilerplate paragraph pulled from another document — become a static copy.

Frames and their anchoring are the second area. Writer distinguishes anchoring to a page, a paragraph, a character or as a character, and RTF’s positioning model is coarser, so text frames and floating images can shift. Database ranges and anything driven from a Base data source have no equivalent at all. A plain letter or report crosses cleanly; a document that was quietly acting as a small application does not, and it is better to find that out here than from the recipient.

RTF has a real style sheet, and that is the single reason this conversion is worth doing at all rather than sending plain text. Named paragraph styles come across as styles rather than being flattened into direct formatting, so headings stay headings. Character styles, fonts, sizes, spacing and colour all map. Tables keep their cells, borders and merged regions, lists keep their numbering, and headers, footers, page numbering, footnotes, hyperlinks and page setup all have direct representations.

The work is done by LibreOffice itself, which is reading its own native format and writing a filter it has maintained for two decades — the most favourable possible arrangement for fidelity. The machine it runs on carries metric-compatible substitutes for Arial, Times New Roman, Courier New, Calibri and Cambria, so line breaks land where they did. What no version of RTF can do is carry a font with the document; it names fonts and stops, so anything drawn in an unusual face will be substituted by whatever the recipient has.

This is the failure people actually hit, and it is silent. A table of contents in Writer is a field that regenerates from the headings; in the RTF it becomes the list of headings and page numbers it happened to hold when the file was written. The same applies to cross-references, page counts, automatic figure and table numbering, and any date that was updating itself.

So the order of operations matters. Update the table of contents, refresh every field and check the page numbering in Writer immediately before converting, because whatever is on screen at that moment is what the recipient gets permanently. If the document is going to be edited at the far end and returned, warn them that the contents list will not follow their changes — for a document that will be edited heavily, sending it and asking for tracked changes on a short extract is often better than sending the whole thing.

RTF has no place to store code, so LibreOffice Basic macros attached to the document do not travel. For most documents that is irrelevant and occasionally it is the point — a recipient on a managed machine may be behind a policy that treats macro-bearing files as executable content, and an inert document sails past it.

Where it matters is a document that was doing work on open: filling a reference number, stamping a date, populating a field from a data source, adjusting what is visible according to a variable. The RTF is a snapshot of the state the document was in, and none of that will run again. If the macro was the mechanism by which the document was correct, converting produces a file that looks correct and is frozen, which is worse than one that is obviously broken.

These are the two answers to "the recipient has nothing installed" and they answer different questions. Send a PDF when the document must look exactly as you laid it out, when nobody should change it, and when reading is the whole task — every machine reads a PDF, including phones, and nothing shifts.

Send an RTF when the recipient has to edit and return it. That is the narrow band where rich text is genuinely the right choice: an editable document, opened without installing anything, saved and sent back. Be realistic about the round trip, though — WordPad supports a small fraction of what Writer does, and a document that goes out through this conversion and comes back through WordPad has been through two lossy filters. For anything long or heavily formatted, ask for their changes as comments on a PDF instead.

On our server rather than in your browser. Converting between two word-processing formats needs a real office engine, and this page says so plainly instead of implying that everything on this site runs on your own device. The file travels over an encrypted connection to a container running LibreOffice headless, and that container has no outbound internet access of its own.

Each job gets its own scratch directory and its own LibreOffice profile — two `soffice` processes sharing one profile corrupt it, and the symptom is a conversion that never returns rather than an error — and the directory is deleted when the job ends whatever the outcome. Anything still running after sixty seconds is terminated. The free tier accepts 25 MB per uploaded file, measured on what you send rather than on what comes back, which matters because the RTF is normally the larger of the two.

Check the RTF in the most limited program you can find rather than in Writer. Writer will render its own output beautifully and tell you nothing; WordPad will show you what a minimal renderer makes of the document, which is much closer to what a recipient on a bare machine sees. TextEdit does the same job on a Mac.

Look at the tables first, then at the images and any text frame that was positioned rather than inline, then at the table of contents to confirm that the frozen page numbers are the right ones. If several documents are going out together, check one carefully and skim the rest — the failures come from the constructs you use rather than from any individual file. Keep the ODT as the master copy, because it is the version that still holds the live fields, the styles and everything RTF had to leave behind.