ReasonableRTF - Fast RTF to Plain Text Converter 🚀

A lightweight and performant C# library designed for rapidly converting Rich Text Format (RTF) files into plain text.

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Features

• Fast: Over 100x faster than RichTextBox
• Accurate: All characters converted correctly — even Wingdings
• Fully cross-platform
• Can read from forward-only streams such as DeflateStream
• We even support this obscure nonsense

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Installation

Install the library via NuGet:

dotnet add package ReasonableRTF.Standard

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Quick Start

Converting an RTF file to plain text is straightforward. The Convert method returns an RtfResult object, providing the converted text and comprehensive error information, if any.

Basic Conversion

Here is how to convert an RTF file to a plain text string:

using ReasonableRTF;
using ReasonableRTF.Models;
using System.IO;

// ...

// 1. Initialize the converter
RtfToTextConverter converter = new RtfToTextConverter();

// 2. Load the RTF data from a file and convert
RtfResult result = converter.Convert("some_file.rtf");

if (result.Error == RtfError.OK)
{
    // Conversion was successful
    string plainText = result.Text;
    Console.WriteLine("Converted Text:\n" + plainText);
}
else
{
    // Handle conversion errors
    Console.WriteLine($"Conversion Error: {result.Error} at byte position: {result.BytePositionOfError}");
    if (result.Exception != null)
    {
        Console.WriteLine($"Exception Details: {result.Exception.Message}");
    }
}

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The RtfResult Class

The RtfResult object provides full details about the conversion process, ensuring you can robustly handle success and failure cases.

Property	Type	Description
Text	string	The converted plain text.
Error	RtfError	The error code. This will be RtfError.OK upon successful conversion.
BytePositionOfError	int	The approximate position in the data stream where the error occurred, or -1 if no error.
Exception	Exception?	The caught exception, or null if no exception occurred during conversion.

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Conversion Options

For more control over the output, you can provide an instance of the RtfToTextConverterOptions class to the Convert method. This allows customization of line breaks, special character handling, and hidden text inclusion.

Applying Options

RtfToTextConverter converter = new RtfToTextConverter();
RtfToTextConverterOptions options = new RtfToTextConverterOptions
{
    ConvertHiddenText = true, // Include text marked as hidden
    LineBreakStyle = LineBreakStyle.LF // Use Unix-style line breaks
};

RtfResult result = converter.Convert("some_file.rtf", options);
// ... check result

RtfToTextConverterOptions Properties

Property	Type	Default	Description
SwapUppercaseAndLowercasePhiSymbols	bool	true	If set to true, swaps the uppercase and lowercase Greek phi characters in the Symbol font translation. This addresses a common reversal in the Windows Symbol font.
SymbolFontA0Char	SymbolFontA0Char	SymbolFontA0Char.EuroSign	Sets the character at index 0xA0 (160) in the Symbol font to Unicode translation table. Important for compatibility with older Symbol font versions.
LineBreakStyle	LineBreakStyle	LineBreakStyle.EnvironmentDefault	Specifies the line break style (CRLF, LF, or environment default) for the converted plain text output.
ConvertHiddenText	bool	false	Determines whether text marked as hidden in the RTF file should be included in the plain text output.

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Benchmarks

.NET 10 64-bit

BenchmarkDotNet v0.15.8, Windows 11 (10.0.26200.8246/25H2/2025Update/HudsonValley2)
AMD Ryzen 5 5600 3.50GHz, 1 CPU, 12 logical and 6 physical cores
.NET SDK 10.0.203
  [Host]     : .NET 10.0.7 (10.0.7, 10.0.726.21808), X64 RyuJIT x86-64-v3
  Job-KEOOAO : .NET 10.0.7 (10.0.7, 10.0.726.21808), X64 RyuJIT x86-64-v3

OutlierMode=DontRemove  MemoryRandomization=True  

Method	Mean	Error	StdDev	Speed
RichTextBox_FullSet	3,331.340 ms	6.2250 ms	5.5183 ms	43.59 MB/s	1x
RichTextBox_NoImageSet	1,432.217 ms	3.7089 ms	3.4693 ms	2.47 MB/s	1x
ReasonableRTF_FullSet	20.582 ms	0.0269 ms	0.0252 ms	7055.28 MB/s	162x
ReasonableRTF_NoImageSet	5.187 ms	0.0096 ms	0.0089 ms	683.18 MB/s	276x
ReasonableRTF_FullSet_Streamed	22.475 ms	0.0574 ms	0.0537 ms	6461.04 MB/s	148x
ReasonableRTF_NoImageSet_Streamed	5.201 ms	0.0143 ms	0.0133 ms	681.34 MB/s	275x

.NET Framework 4.8 64-bit

BenchmarkDotNet v0.15.8, Windows 11 (10.0.26200.8246/25H2/2025Update/HudsonValley2)
AMD Ryzen 5 5600 3.50GHz, 1 CPU, 12 logical and 6 physical cores
  [Host]     : .NET Framework 4.8.1 (4.8.9325.0), X64 RyuJIT VectorSize=256
  DefaultJob : .NET Framework 4.8.1 (4.8.9325.0), X64 RyuJIT VectorSize=256

Method	Mean	Error	StdDev	Speed
RichTextBox_FullSet	2,779.775 ms	3.9318 ms	3.2833 ms	52.24 MB/s	1x
RichTextBox_NoImageSet	992.237 ms	2.5478 ms	2.2585 ms	3.57 MB/s	1x
ReasonableRTF_FullSet	28.226 ms	0.0418 ms	0.0349 ms	5144.61 MB/s	99x
ReasonableRTF_NoImageSet	7.703 ms	0.0187 ms	0.0175 ms	460.04 MB/s	129x
ReasonableRTF_FullSet_Streamed	30.723 ms	0.0665 ms	0.0555 ms	4726.48 MB/s	91x
ReasonableRTF_NoImageSet_Streamed	7.811 ms	0.0057 ms	0.0053 ms	453.68 MB/s	127x

.NET Framework 4.8 32-bit

BenchmarkDotNet v0.15.8, Windows 11 (10.0.26200.8039/25H2/2025Update/HudsonValley2)
AMD Ryzen 5 5600 3.50GHz, 1 CPU, 12 logical and 6 physical cores
  [Host]     : .NET Framework 4.8.1 (4.8.9325.0), X86 LegacyJIT
  DefaultJob : .NET Framework 4.8.1 (4.8.9325.0), X86 LegacyJIT

Method	Mean	Error	StdDev	Speed
RichTextBox_FullSet	6,932.056 ms	131.6848 ms	140.9013 ms	20.95 MB/s	1x
RichTextBox_NoImageSet	2,885.139 ms	57.0121 ms	81.7651 ms	1.23 MB/s	1x
ReasonableRTF_FullSet	45.670 ms	0.1937 ms	0.1812 ms	3179.59 MB/s	152x
ReasonableRTF_NoImageSet	9.912 ms	0.0412 ms	0.0386 ms	357.51 MB/s	291x
ReasonableRTF_FullSet_Streamed	50.416 ms	0.1050 ms	0.0982 ms	2880.27 MB/s	138x
ReasonableRTF_NoImageSet_Streamed	9.968 ms	0.0300 ms	0.0266 ms	355.50 MB/s	289x

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Supported RTF features

Supported

• All basic plain text, hex-encoded chars, Unicode-encoded chars
• Symbol fonts (Wingdings 1, 2 and 3, Webdings, Symbol, and Zapf Dingbats) converted to Unicode equivalents
• Characters specified as "SYMBOL" field instructions
• Undocumented use of the \langN keyword to specify character encoding - old versions of RichTextBox used to support this

Partially supported

• Tables: Cells and rows have spaces between them, but not much functionality beyond that.
• Lists: Numbers and bullets show up (that's better than RichTextBox most of the time), but indentation usually doesn't.

Not currently supported

• Footnotes
• "HYPERLINK" field instruction value
• Math objects

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License and Attribution

Code License

The original code for this RTF converter was written by Brian Tobin and is licensed under the MIT License (Copyright 2024-2026 Brian Tobin). For the full license text, please refer to the LICENSE file ReasonableRTF.

Flamifly contributed to the readme (installation, quick start, documentation, etc), and created the .NET Standard version.