RTF
document file format developed by Microsoft for cross-platform document interchange that most text processing programs are able to read and write. RTF uses the ANSI, PC-8, Macintosh, or IBM® PC character set to control the representation and formatting of a document, both on the screen and in print. With the RTF Specification, documents created under different operating systems and with different software applications can be transferred between those operating systems and applications. The simple example of an RTF file:
{\rtf
Hello\par
This is a bold {\b text}.\par
The\ul End
}
will show as
Hello
This is a bold text.
TheEnd
In this example, new lines are marked by '\par's, bold is marked by '\b', and underline is marked by '\ul'. A backslash '\' starts a control code, a carriage return (CR) or a space will be used as a delimiter indicating the end of control code. Everything else will be treated as texts. A group consists of texts and control codes may be enclosed in braces ({ }). This syntax is similar to that of TeX. By using the control codes in file, a document with specific font, fontsize, or color of the texts, or tables with different border styles can be easily created. Because of this, a lot programmers like to create the text-based file using RTF specification for the formated documents for variety purposes.
The RTF format is the default rich text format for Mac OS X's default editor TextEdit and Microsoft Windows' default editor WordPad.
