# ASCII-fying RTF from the command line
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ascii-fying-rtf-from-the-command-line/568975
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [January 25, 2011, 10:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ascii-fying-rtf-from-the-command-line/568975 "2011-01-25T22:12:40Z")
**Posts on this page:** 4
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)
#### Post date: [January 25, 2011, 10:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ascii-fying-rtf-from-the-command-line/568975/1 "2011-01-25T22:12:40Z")
Suppose I have an RTF file, with things like colors and superscripts/subscripts in it, and I want to be able to strip out all of the extra formatting and turn it into just a plain text file. I could do this, for example, by selecting everything in the RTF file, copying it to the clipboard, and pasting it into a text editor. But suppose I want to be able to do this in an automated way, from the command line. Is there any simple, standard tool that will do this?
To be a little more clear on my requirements, I do _not_ want to leave any trace of the formatting: Text that was formerly superscripted should not be indicated by a ^, or anything like that. And it is essential that it _does_ preserve all whitespace.
If it matters, I’m on Mac OSX, 10.4 or 10.6, and the RTF files would be of the sort generated by TextEdit.
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### Author:  [@Squink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Squink)
#### Post date: [January 25, 2011, 10:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ascii-fying-rtf-from-the-command-line/568975/2 "2011-01-25T22:40:02Z")
In Terminal, type ‘man textutil’
> [@](#):
>
> -convert fmt Convert the specified files to the indicated format and
> write each one back to the file system.
> …
> fmt is one of: txt, html, rtf, rtfd, doc, docx, wordml, odt, or webarchive
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### Author:  [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)
#### Post date: [January 25, 2011, 10:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ascii-fying-rtf-from-the-command-line/568975/3 "2011-01-25T22:50:07Z")
[UnRTF does everything you want and more.](http://www.gnu.org/software/unrtf/) Look to your distro’s package management system to install it.
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### Author:  [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)
#### Post date: [January 25, 2011, 11:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ascii-fying-rtf-from-the-command-line/568975/4 "2011-01-25T23:20:09Z")
Thanks **Squink** , it looks like that does exactly what I want.