RTF (Rich Text Format, .rtf)

The Rich Text Format (often abbreviated to RTF) is a proprietary document file format developed by Microsoft in 1987 for cross-platform document interchange. Most word processors are able to read and write RTF documents.

It should not be confused with enriched text (mimetype "text/enriched" of RFC 1896) or its predecessor Rich Text (mimetype "text/richtext" of RFC 1341 and 1521) which are completely different specifications.

Most word processing software implementations support RTF format import and export, often making it a "common" format between otherwise incompatible word processing software.

The WordPad editor in Microsoft Windows creates RTF files by default. It once defaulted to the Microsoft Word 6.0 file format, but write support for Word documents was dropped in a security update.

The free and open-source word processors AbiWord, OpenOffice.org, and KWord can view and edit RTF files.

The default editor for Mac OS X, TextEdit, can also view and edit RTF files.

Since RTF files are text files, it is easy to produce RTF with many programming languages, like Tcl, PL/SQL, Ruby, Perl, Java, C++, Pascal and Delphi, COBOL, or Lisp.