What is RTF format and how is it different from DOC?
- RICH TEXT FORMAT - the structure of the format is revealed, and almost all Text editors support it
DOC is a format invented by Microsoft, the structure is patented, it constantly changes depending on the office version
and the further you go, the fewer programs it is correctly supported, but since basically everyone uses Microsoft Office, it’s not scary yetrtf, it turns out, was also invented by Bill Gates
- Text format appeared earlier than doc. Designed for Word Pad and can be opened by almost all e-readers. Otherwise there is not much difference for the user.
- RDF is a light version of DOC
- More universal format. Most likely to be opened by a Thief of any version.
If you, Anna, noticed that Word of an older version may not open a document created in a newer one. - Rich Text Format (RTF)
This format was defined by Microsoft as a standard format for exchanging text documents. Therefore, this format is similar in purpose to the SYLK format for spreadsheets. RTF is supported by many Microsoft products. For example, starting with version 2.0, it was introduced into Windows as a Clipboard format, making it possible to exchange data between various Windows application programs. In addition, the RT format is supported by WORD for Macintosh, starting with version 3.X, and WORD for PC, starting with version 4.X.RTF uses only character-representable codes from the ASCII, MAC and PC character sets to exchange documents. In addition to text, the file in RT format contains control commands in a readable form.
The document consists primarily of control commands for setting up a program for reading files in RTF format. These commands can be divided into control words and control symbols.
Most text editors implement import/export into RTF format, so this format is often used as a general format for transferring text from one program to another.DOC or .doc (from English document) is a file name extension used for files representing text, with or without markup.
The .DOC extension was often used to denote simple text files without formatting, but later came to be used for binary formats with markup.
In the 1990s, Microsoft began using the extension for a series of proprietary file formats for its word processor, Microsoft Word. As a result of Microsoft's monopoly on the office products market, DOC has become synonymous with this file format. Other values for the .doc extension have largely fallen out of use on the IBM PC platform.
You"re here because you have a file that has a file extension ending in .rtf. Files with the file extension .rtf can only be launched by certain applications. It"s possible that .rtf files are data files rather than documents or media , which means they"re not meant to be viewed at all.
what is a .rtf file?
Files in the RTF extension are text documents that can be created, opened, viewed, edited or modified using popular word processing applications for both Mac and Microsoft Windows-based computers. Some of these word processing programs are Microsoft WordPad for Windows and Microsoft Word 2011 for Mac. RTF files provide users with wide cross compatibility support, which was the main objective for the development of the Rich Text Format technology, and these .rtf files can even be opened, viewed and used with database applications. The content of RTF files may include blocks of text with bold or italicized alphanumeric characters and symbols as well as a wide variety of typefaces. Images, tables or charts may also be embedded into these RTF files, and text documents saved in the .rtf extension have support for many font types and styling or formatting attributes. Some of these functionalities are no longer supported by Microsoft Word 2010, most likely because Microsoft decided to discontinue further development on the technology used for these RTF files.
how to open a .rtf file?
Launch a .rtf file, or any other file on your PC, by double-clicking it. If your file associations are set up correctly, the application that"s meant to open your .rtf file will open it. It"s possible you may need to download or purchase the correct application. It"s also possible that you have the correct application on your PC, but .rtf files aren"t yet associated with it. In this case, when you try to open a .rtf file, you can tell Windows which application is the correct one for that file. From then on, opening a .rtf file will open the correct application.
applications that open a .rtf file
Microsoft WordPad
Microsoft Word
Microsoft Word is a word processor program that is packed in the Microsoft Office Suite. It is developed by Microsoft Corporation, generating a .doc file extension when the file is saved. A document file format (.doc) is a text or binary file format for saving documents on a storage media, mainly for computer use, like typing text, charts, tables, page formatting, graphs, images and other documents whose content is created and edited. Contents of these documents are printable in any sizes and are capable of opening in other devices provided that its operating system is able to read DOC files. This .doc file extension has become extensive de facto standard for office documents, but it is an owned format and is not always totally supported by other word processors. A variety of programs that is able to open this type of file, and different operating systems and have installed programs that can open a 1ST file are: Microsoft Word, Microsoft Notepad, Microsoft Word, IBM Lotus WordPro, and Corel WordPerfect.Microsoft Notepad
Microsoft Notepad
Notepad is a basic text editor used to create plain documents. It is commonly used to view or edit text (.txt) files, and a simple tool for creating Web pages, and supports only the basic formatting in HTML documents. It also has a simple built-in logging function. Each time a file that initializes with .log is opened, the program inserts a text timestamp on the last line of the file. It accepts text from the Windows clipboard. This is helpful in stripping embedded font type and style codes from formatted text, such as when copying text from a Web page and pasting into an email message or other “What You See Is What You Get† text editor. The formatted text is temporarily pasted into Notepad, and then immediately copied again in stripped format to be pasted into the other program. Simple text editors like Notepad may be used to change text with markup, such as HTML. Early versions of Notepad offered only the most basic functions, such as finding text. Newer versions of Windows include an updated version of Notepad with a search and replace function (Ctrl + H), as well as Ctrl + F for search and similar keyboard shortcuts. It makes use of a built-in window class named edit. In older versions such as Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me and Windows 3.1, there is a 64k limit on the size of the file being edited, an operating system limit of the EDIT class. 
Microsoft Works
Microsoft Works
Microsoft Works is incorporated package software that was developed by Microsoft. It is less expensive, smaller, and has fewer features than Microsoft Office or other office suites. Its central functionality includes a word processor, a spreadsheet and a database management system. Newer versions have a calendar application and a dictionary while older versions included a terminal emulator. Files with WPS extension is utilized for output files of the Microsoft Works word processing application. These files are classified as text documents that can be created, saved, viewed and edited using the Microsoft Works program. Microsoft Word 2010, Microsoft Publisher 2010, Planamesa NeoOffice, and OxygenOffice Professional are some of the applications that are able to open and view the content of these WPS files. The contents of these WPS files can also be exported to other compatible word document formats. This promotes convenience and efficient document presentation, group collaboration and sharing between users of different systems and word processing applications; however, WPS document cannot be applied with macros and other formatting options available in Microsoft Word; so Microsoft discontinued support and development of the Microsoft Works application with its version 9 and the release of Microsoft Word 2010.Notepad2
The Notepad2 application is a more advanced text editor for Windows developed by Florian Balmer. This program originated from the original built-in Microsoft Notepad which is why it is also effective and fast even when it is small. Notepad2 also has a lot of features such as syntax highlighting that allows a text or a source code to be displayed using different fonts and colors. This syntax highlighting feature of notepad2 allows users to write programming language easily and clearly. This amazing function of Notepad2 is also owing to several other features it possesses such as auto indentation, regular and expression-based find and replace feature, bracket matching, newline conversion, encoding conversion as well as multiple undo and redo features. These features make the function of the simple Notepad more advanced and it makes Notepad more interesting to use either to open files inThe abbreviation RTF stands for “Rich Text Format”, that is, “rich text format”. Or, simply put, designed: with different styles, fonts, sizes and colors of letters. In many cases, this format intended for documents can be a relief from troubles, so everyone who uses computers needs to understand it. As always, in the process of getting to know this phenomenon, we will certainly pay attention to issues of practicality.
A little history
It happened in the old days, in 1982. In those distant times when Microsoft and Adobe were friends. They needed to come up with something for a new program - the word processor Word for MS DOS, which was scheduled for release in 1893.
Without thinking twice, we took plain text and added special markup tags to it (they were called control characters). Like, this is where the paragraph will begin, here the text should be displayed in italics, there in bold, and so on.
A lot has changed since then, but the essence remains the same: RTF are text files, like HTML documents. You can open them in text editors like Notepad in Windows and Gedit in Ubuntu to look at all those tags if you want.
Microsoft and Adobe soon parted ways, but the format remained proprietary. (Adobe decided to use the concept for another markup language, PostScript, which later led to the advent of PDF.) Well, Microsoft released the latest RTF specification in March 2008. The modern electronic and digital world is oriented towards it.
The essence in brief
The structure of an RTF document is quite simple. At the beginning of the text block, a control character is indicated, preceded by “\” (in the sense of a bar inclined to the left). Specifically, \b before a bold block, \i before italic, \par before a paragraph.
To denote the blocks themselves, since there are no closing tags, curly braces () are used. Therefore, bold in the source text looks like this: (\b bold) , and italic looks like this: (\i hello world Ну а в самом начале указывается сам формат \rtf1:!}
(\rtf1 \par (\i Hello world Только что было приветствие курсивом. А теперь {/b немножко полужирного текста}. \par } !}
This is, of course, a very simple example. In fact, a fair number of all sorts of parameters are lined up in a row through oblique lines: encoding, language and other data. Something like:
(\rtf1\ansi\deff3\adeflang1025 (\fonttbl(\f0\froman\fprq2\fcharset0 Times New Roman;) \par (\i Hello world, once again Как видите, абракадабры {/b предостаточно} даже в маленьком фрагменте. \par } !}
Powerful word processors like Word or LibreOffice Writer especially like to insert a lot of control characters, marking everything up too meticulously.
In addition, Russian letters are replaced by byte designations - encoding characters (in the examples, for the sake of clarity, the replacement is not shown). This makes the source code completely unreadable and bloats it out of proportion.
Software
In addition to the above-mentioned Microsoft Word and LibreOffice Writer, there are many less powerful programs, RTF editors. However, not all of them are suitable for work.
FocusWriter is perhaps the best of the current free RTF editors. You can attach spell checking dictionaries used in LibreOffice Writer. It works very quickly in both Windows and Ubuntu, takes up little space and does not consume system resources. The interface design changes to suit different tastes.
It stubbornly remembers and tries to load the last opened document at startup - perhaps this is still a drawback. Designed primarily for writers working on one book, rather than several at once. In keeping with the same concept, the toolbar hides before you hover the mouse pointer, so that nothing distracts from your work.
But this interface is very convenient on netbooks and other devices with a small display. Writing articles, letters and all sorts of notes is a pleasure.
Why do you need RTF?
Firstly, text files are not infected with viruses, and it is impossible to insert malicious macros into them. *rtf files are completely safe, just like *txt. But *doc is quite capable of presenting unpleasant surprises.
Secondly, Rich Text Format is understood by all modern word processors and, of course, RTF editors in all popular operating systems.
Your humble servant saw with his own eyes how Word 2010 in Windows 7 flatly refused to open *odt made in LibreOffice. He said that the file contained some kind of error. I had to take the flash drive back to the computer with Ubuntu (luckily it was in a nearby office) and convert the document to RTF. After which Word opened the file without objection.
How to live with it
Small Russian-language documents, ten to fifteen pages long, can be safely saved in RTF. They will take up little space by modern standards. But *rtf files with entire novels will swell incredibly and, when opened, will require a fair amount of CPU load. Because the letters of the Russian alphabet are replaced by byte encoding designations, as stated earlier.
Let's say while working in Ubuntu you need to quickly save a small text that you will later need to open in Windows. If you create *txt in Gedit, then Notepad will most likely show something alien instead of letters, without automatically recognizing the encoding.
But if you use a fast FocusWriter and produce *rtf, there will be no problems, everything will be displayed normally. The encoding will be indicated in the source code after \rtf1 .
Let's summarize
So, Rich Text Format (aka RTF) is universal and therefore suitable for creating and opening formatted texts in different operating systems. However, it is best to use it only for small Russian-language documents. For English speakers (and others with Latin letters) there is no problem with bloating files.
Anything can happen in life, and if you suddenly need to open documents in the still popular Windows, then in this case the important files that you keep in *odt in Ubuntu can be duplicated in *rtf. Because computers with Microsoft OS often have Word, not LibreOffice Writer.
Previous publications:
Hello friends! Today we will talk about an unusual file format called rtf. From the article you will learn a little about the history of the creation of this extension, how to open the rtf format, what programs are used for this. Since this file is quite common, there are many applications that can open and edit it. In this article I will list only a few of the best utilities that can open this type of file.
Rtf format - first acquaintance
This format saves text files that support rich text. Back in 1982, Microsoft programmers proposed using the rtf extension, which could subsequently be formatted. After this, this file format began to be supported by almost all GPUs. The most famous of them is, of course, Microsoft Word.
How to open rtf - selection of programs
As you already understand, in order to work with this file we will need a text editor. Since the format is the brainchild of Microsoft, it took care of its users and built a free text editor called WordPad directly into Windows, which works with this type of extension. But there are also alternative program options. Among the most advanced alternatives are:
- AbiWord
- OpenOffice
These two free programs will easily open any file with the rtf extension. It makes no sense to list all other applications, since the opening process for all of them is identical. The only difference between them is the interface and settings. The two programs above are leaders in the free word processor niche, so I recommend using one of them.
Extensions are some of the files associated or which can be opened with the Microsoft WordPad. RTF files are text documents that can be created, opened, viewed, edited or changed using word processing applications for both Mac and Microsoft Windows-based computers, like Microsoft WordPad for Windows and Microsoft Word 2011 for Mac. It gives the users a wide cross compatibility support, which was the central objective for the improvement of the Rich Text Format technology, and these .rtf files can even be opened, viewed and used with database applications. The OpenBSD Unix platform is frequently used in computers running as Web servers of a secure network. OpenBSD files may be saved in directories of the OpenBSD system that were generated upon installation of the software applications. Files with the .openbsd extension can be opened by standard text editors, particularly well-known like Microsoft Notepad, and this text editor may also be used to create and edit OPENBSD files. Files with the .readme extension are text documents engaged to give users with beneficial information and specific details about certain applications installed in the system. These files can be opened, viewed and edited with a selection of text editors including Microsoft Notepad and Microsoft WordPad.
Microsoft Word
Microsoft Word is a word processor program that is packed in the Microsoft Office Suite. It is developed by Microsoft Corporation, generating a .doc file extension when the file is saved. A document file format (.doc) is a text or binary file format for saving documents on a storage media, mainly for computer use, like typing text, charts, tables, page formatting, graphs, images and other documents whose content is created and edited. Contents of these documents are printable in any sizes and are capable of opening in other devices provided that its operating system is able to read DOC files. This .doc file extension has become extensive de facto standard for office documents, but it is an owned format and is not always totally supported by other word processors. A variety of programs that is able to open this type of file, and different operating systems and have installed programs that can open a 1ST file are: Microsoft Word, Microsoft Notepad, Microsoft Word, IBM Lotus WordPro, and Corel WordPerfect.Microsoft Notepad
Microsoft Notepad
Notepad is a basic text editor used to create plain documents. It is commonly used to view or edit text (.txt) files, and a simple tool for creating Web pages, and supports only the basic formatting in HTML documents. It also has a simple built-in logging function. Each time a file that initializes with .log is opened, the program inserts a text timestamp on the last line of the file. It accepts text from the Windows clipboard. This is helpful in stripping embedded font type and style codes from formatted text, such as when copying text from a Web page and pasting into an email message or other “What You See Is What You Get† text editor. The formatted text is temporarily pasted into Notepad, and then immediately copied again in stripped format to be pasted into the other program. Simple text editors like Notepad may be used to change text with markup, such as HTML. Early versions of Notepad offered only the most basic functions, such as finding text. Newer versions of Windows include an updated version of Notepad with a search and replace function (Ctrl + H), as well as Ctrl + F for search and similar keyboard shortcuts. It makes use of a built-in window class named edit. In older versions such as Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me and Windows 3.1, there is a 64k limit on the size of the file being edited, an operating system limit of the EDIT class.
Microsoft Works
