Rich Text Format

The Rich Text Format (often abbreviated RTF) is a legacy proprietary document file format with published specification developed by Microsoft Corporation from 1987 until 2008 for cross-platform document interchange with Microsoft products. Prior to 2008, Microsoft published updated specifications for RTF with major revisions of Microsoft Word and Office versions. It is the default format of WordPad and TextEdit but both of those allow saving to ODF since 2009. Full office suites never used it as a default. Since Windows 11 removed WordPad in an update, it is no longer able to open them without additional software. Most word processors are able to read and write some versions of RTF. There are several different revisions of RTF specification; portability of files will depend on what version of RTF is being used. RTF should not be confused with enriched text or its predecessor Rich Text, or with IBM's RFT-DCA (Revisable Format Text-Document Content Architecture), as these are different specifications. RTF is not a markup language. It is not considered human-readable and was never meant to be edited in a text editor. Most RTF files only contain plain text in ASCII encoding because non-ASCII letters are represented by escape sequences and binary data is encoded in Base16. The specification mentions \binN to insert binary data directly but except for possibly some historical exceptions all implementations write binary data in Base16 and the \binN embedding feature has mainly been abused by malicious software. In the context of RTF binary data refers to images, fonts and OLE objects.