Most people have the software to read RTF. Moreover, RTF is the data format for “rich text controls” in MSWindows APIs RTF-rendering APIs are part of the Carbon/Cocoa APIs in Mac OS X and you can even read RTF documents on iPods, Apple’s portable music players. While not every word processor understands every RTF feature perfectly, most of them understand the RTF commands discussed in this book quite well.

Since RTF has been around for so long, just about every word processor since the late 1980s can understand it. That means if you generate an RTF file today, you should be able to read it in 10 years, and you should have no trouble reading an RTF file generated 10 years ago. In fact, while there has been a proliferation of incompatible binary formats calling themselves “Microsoft Word file format,” RTF has stayed the course and evolved along backward-compatible lines. RTF’s syntax is stable and straightforward, and its specification has existed for over a decade-an eternity in computer years. Microsoft doesn’t distribute copies of them anymore, but you can find them all over the Internet by running a search on “Rich Text Format (RTF) Specification” in Google or a similar search engine. Version 1.5 of the specification and before are more verbose, and might be more useful. In the Microsoft Knowledgebase at, its access number is 269575. The current version (v1.7) is available at. This book is not a complete reference to every last feature of RTF Microsoft’s comprehensive but terse Rich Text Format (RTF) Specification is the closest you will find to that. The flexibility of RTF makes it an ideal format for everything from generating invoices or sales reports, to producing dictionaries based on databases of words.

For example, if you even just skim this book, you should be able to write a program (in the programming language of your choice) that can analyze the contents of a database and produce a summary of it as an RTF document with whatever kinds of formatting you want. Instead, it’s meant to be a format for document data that all sorts of programs can read and write. RTF is not intended to be a markup language anyone would use for coding entire documents by hand (although it has been done!). This book is also a useful introduction to parsing RTF, although that is a more complex task.

It covers the essentials of RTF, especially the parts that you need to know if you’re writing a program to generate RTF files. This book is a convenient reference for Rich Text Format (RTF).

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