Article 157171 of comp.os.vms:
On 16 Oct 1996, Malcolm Dunnett wrote:

>   Is there a utility which will run on VMS and convert RTF to ASCII?
> 
>   The objective of this is to have a program our Lynx users can
> use to view documents created via MSWord. We've looked at storing them
> as HTML using Internet Assistant, but it doesn't seem to retain the
> formatting very well ( eg tabbed columns ). RTF can maintain the
> formatting, and can be browsed easily enough from PC clients, but
> doesn't produce anything useful when browsed with Lynx.

Use RTFTOHTML (available from http://www.sunpack.com/RTF/ -
shareware) to convert your RTF format to HTML, and make that available. 
I'd like to bet that not only your Lynx users would welcome that. 
It's available for a wide range of platforms and OSs, although I
haven't particularly tried the VMS versions myself.

p.s don't confuse Chris Hector's excellent product with an earlier
thing called rtf2html (which its own author calls a "hack").

Of course, it would be unreasonable to expect any such program to "do"
things that HTML itself isn't capable of.  You don't get TABs for
example.  But you can use tables.