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The Rich Text Format (often abbreviated to '''RTF''') is a Proprietary Document File Format developed by DEC in 1987 for Cross-platform document interchange. Most Word Processor s 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. HISTORY DEC developed RTF in 1987. It was purchased by Microsoft around 1990, who extended the standard. It is currently at version 1.9, released January 2007. SAMPLE RTF DOCUMENT As an example, the following RTF code:
would be rendered like this when read by an appropriate word processor:
A Backslash ( \) starts an RTF ''control code''. The \par control code indicates the end of a paragraph, and \b switches to a bold typeface. Brackets ({ and }) define a ''group''; the example uses a group to limit the scope of the \b control code. Everything else will be treated as ''clear text'', or the text to be formatted. A valid RTF document is a group starting with the
tf control code.CHARACTER ENCODING RTF is a 7- escapes and Unicode escapes. In a code page escape, two Hexadecimal digits following an apostrophe are used for denoting a character taken from a Windows code page. For example, if control codes specifying Windows-1256 are present, the sequence \'c8 will encode the Arabic letter beh (ب).If a Unicode escape is required, the control word \u is used, followed by a 16-bit signed decimal integer giving the Unicode codepoint number. For the benefit of programs without Unicode support, this must be followed by the nearest representation of this character in the specified code page. For example, \u1576? would give the Arabic letter ''beh'', specifying that older programs which do not have Unicode support should render it as a question mark instead.The control word \uc0 can be used to indicate that subsequent Unicode escape sequences within the current group do not specify a substitution character.HUMAN READABILITY Unlike most word processing formats, good RTF code can be made Human-readable . That is to say that when an RTF file is opened in a text editor, the text is legible and the markup is not too distracting or counter-intuitive. The RTF files produced by most programs, such as MS Word, will contain such a large number of control codes for compatibility with older programs that most files will easily be an order of magnitude larger than the raw text and very difficult to read. Formats such as MS Word's .doc are, in contrast, binary formats with only a few scraps of legible text.Nowadays, human-readable XML-based formats are becoming more common, but RTF's readability was a rare thing when it came out. Note that the XML-based OpenDocument and Office_open_xml formats are often not immediately human-readable due to its being a bundle of several different files within a ZIP archive. COMMON IMPLEMENTATIONS 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 and OpenOffice.org 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 Ruby , Perl , Java , C++ , Pascal , COBOL , or Lisp . Perl, for example, has the RTF::Writer module for this. SEE ALSO
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