What is an RTF file?

RTF is a plain-text format you can open in any editor. It is used for moving data between programs and editing.

The extension is .rtf, and the full name is Rich Text Format. Both matter less than what the file can hold, which is what the rest of this page is about.

Microsoft published it in 1987.

A format that has been readable for that long is a format worth trusting with something you want back in ten years.

It is written down and implementable, though the vendor decides what the next version looks like. In practice that is enough for the file to keep opening; it is not enough to be sure of it.

It still opens everywhere and is still written by older tools, but nothing new is being built around it. Convert what you mean to keep, and do not choose it for something starting today.

RTF is not limited to one page, which matters when converting to something that is: one conversion produces one file holding a single page — the first one, unless the page is something the converter lets you pick.

RTF holds a text document: paragraphs that reflow to fit whatever page they land on.

That is what decides how it converts: the text reflows, so page numbers are a property of the output rather than of the file.

Microsoft Word, LibreOffice Writer and TextEdit read it, and so do most programs of the same kind.

If a file will not open, the format is rarely the problem — it is more often that the program predates it. Converting to something older is the reliable way past that, and it is what the rest of this site is for.

No browser reads it.

That is the single most common reason to convert it: not that the format is bad, but that the place you want to show the file cannot read it.

RTF is meant to be opened and changed. Keep the file in this format for as long as the work is going on, and export from it whenever a finished copy is needed.

Open an RTF in a plain editor and it is readable, in a fashion: a stream of control words beginning with backslashes, with the actual words in between. Bold is a control word, so is a font, so is a paragraph break. The file is ASCII throughout, with anything outside it escaped.

Microsoft published the specification in 1987 so that documents could move between word processors without either one having to understand the other’s internal format. It worked, and forty years later it is still the only formatted document format that essentially everything reads and writes.

Word, Pages, LibreOffice, Google Docs, WordPad, TextEdit, AbiWord, Scrivener, and a long tail of legal, medical and government software — all open RTF, and most of them export it. There is no other format with that property that also carries formatting.

That is why it survives in specific corners: court filing systems, medical records, older case-management software, and anywhere a document has to be readable by software chosen in 2003. It is the lowest common denominator with styling, and it is chosen for exactly that reason rather than for any quality of its own.

Copy formatted text from a word processor and paste it into another program with the formatting intact, and RTF is very often what travelled. It is one of the standard clipboard flavours on Windows and macOS, alongside plain text and HTML.

Most people therefore use the format daily without ever seeing a .rtf file. It also explains a familiar annoyance: pasting into a program that prefers the RTF flavour brings fonts and colours you did not want, and "paste as plain text" is the instruction to take a different flavour instead.

No tracked changes worth the name, no comments that survive reliably, no macros, and nothing resembling a modern collaboration feature. Tables exist and are fragile — complex ones frequently arrive with merged cells undone or borders missing.

Images are embedded as hexadecimal text, which is the other significant limitation: encoding binary data as hex doubles it, so an RTF with a few photographs in it is considerably larger than the DOCX equivalent, sometimes by several times. For a text-only document RTF is compact; for an illustrated one it is wasteful.

The format has a genuinely poor security history. RTF parsers have had a long run of vulnerabilities, and the format could embed OLE objects — which made a document a delivery mechanism for executable content. Several widely used exploits over the last decade arrived as RTF files.

Microsoft eventually blocked RTF in Outlook’s protected view and many corporate mail gateways strip or quarantine it outright. Nothing about the format is dangerous in itself, but a document arriving as RTF from an unknown sender deserves the same caution as any other attachment, and if a recipient reports never receiving your file, this is a likely reason.

DOCX for anything you are writing: it is smaller with images, it supports tracked changes and comments, and it is what every collaborator expects. Convert an RTF to DOCX as soon as it becomes a working document rather than a delivery one.

Plain text when the formatting genuinely does not matter — it is smaller, simpler and will outlive both. RTF sits in the narrow gap between: formatting is required, and the recipient’s software is unknown or old. That gap is real and it is not large.

To DOCX, conversion is clean for ordinary documents: paragraphs, styles, lists, basic tables and images all map across, because everything RTF can express DOCX can express better. Complex tables are the place to look afterwards.

To PDF for anything final, which fixes the layout and removes the question of what the recipient’s word processor will do with it. And to plain text when only the words matter — worth remembering that RTF is where a great deal of legacy correspondence lives, and extracting the text is often the whole purpose of touching the file at all.