All subsequent releases of Microsoft Word for Macintosh, as well as all Windows versions, can read and write in RTF format.
For example, if the code page is set to Windows-1256, the sequence \'c8 will encode the Arabic letter bāʼ ب.
For the benefit of programs without Unicode support, this must be followed by the nearest representation of this character in the specified code page.
would give the Arabic letter bāʼ ب, but indicates that older programs which do not support Unicode 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 the substitution character.
Support for Unicode was made due to text handling changes in Microsoft Word – Microsoft Word 97 is a partially Unicode-enabled application and it handles text using the 16-bit Unicode character encoding scheme.
[25] Microsoft Word 2000 and later versions are Unicode-enabled applications that handle text using the 16-bit Unicode character encoding scheme.
[3] Because RTF files are usually 7-bit ASCII plain text, they can be easily transmitted between PC-based operating systems.
[29] RTF is a data format for saving and sharing documents, not a markup language; it is not intended for intuitive and easy typing.
RTF was unique in its simple formatting control which allowed non-RTF aware programs like Microsoft Notepad to open and provide readable files.
Regardless, these files contain large amounts of formatting code, so are often ten or more times larger than the corresponding plain text.
Most word processing software support either RTF format importing and exporting for some RTF specification or direct editing, which makes it a "common" format between otherwise incompatible word processing software and operating systems.
Also typically supported are left-, center- and right-aligned text, font specification and document margins.
The RTF specification does not require this method, and several implementations do not include the WMF copy (e.g. Abiword or Ted).
[29] The RTF 1.2 specification defined use of drawing objects, known as shapes, such as rectangles, ellipses, lines, arrows and polygons.
For this reason, RTF was often recommended over those formats when the spread of computer viruses through macros was a concern.
[60] However, WordPad can read and save many RTF features that it cannot create, including tables, strikeout, superscript, subscript, "extra" colors, text background colors, numbered lists, right or left indent, quasi-hypertext and URL linking, and various line spacings.
RTF is also the data format for "rich text controls" in MS Windows APIs.
Much older Mac word processing application programs such as MacWrite and WriteNow had the same RTF abilities as TextEdit has.
The following free and open-source word processors attempt to work with Microsoft's RTF file format, see the criticism paragraph below.
SIL International's freeware application for developing and publishing dictionaries uses RTF as its most common form of document output.
RTF can be used on some ebook readers because of its interoperability,[61] simplicity and low CPU processing requirements.
[62][63] GNU UnRTF is an open-source program to convert RTF into HTML, LaTeX, troff macros and other formats.
pyth is a Python library to create and convert documents in RTF, XHTML and PDF format.
Pandoc is an open source document converter with multiple output formats, including RTF.
The macOS command line tool textutil can convert files between rtf, rtfd, text, doc, docx, wordml, odt and webarchive formats.