.rtf File — Rich Text Format

Rich Text Format (RTF) was developed by Microsoft in 1987 as a cross-platform document interchange format. Unlike binary formats, RTF uses plain text markup commands prefixed with backslashes to encode formatting information like fonts, colors, margins, bold, italic, tables, and images. This text-based approach makes RTF highly portable across different word processors and operating systems. RTF files are larger than equivalent binary document formats because formatting commands are stored as readable ASCII text. The format supports embedded images (as hex-encoded data), Unicode text, headers and footers, and basic table structures. RTF gained popularity as a safe document exchange format because it was less susceptible to macro viruses compared to DOC files. While its feature set is more limited than modern XML-based formats like DOCX, RTF remains useful for simple cross-platform document sharing and as an intermediate format for text conversion pipelines.