RTF files handle text formatting like bold, italics, and fonts while remaining widely compatible.
Common Uses
Creating formatted files with broad interoperability
Exchanging text between different word processors
Simple formatted text storage
RTF Transformation FAQ
What is an RTF file?
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RTF (Rich Text Format) is a file format that includes text formatting information.
Will my RTF look the same on someone else's computer?
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Approximately, not exactly. An RTF describes flowing content — styles, tables, images — and leaves the final layout to whatever program opens it, so a missing font or a different version reflows pages and moves page breaks. That is a feature when the document is still being written and a problem when it is being sent out for signature. Convert to a fixed-layout format for the second case. RTF files are bloated relative to their content and lose modern features like tracked changes, comments and complex tables.
Do tracked changes and comments survive converting an RTF?
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Between word-processor formats, usually — revision marks and margin comments are part of the document and travel with it, even if two programs draw them differently. Into a fixed-layout or plain-text target they do not survive at all: the text is flattened to whatever the current view shows, which can silently accept every pending edit. Resolve the revisions first when the output has to be the final wording.
Why is RTF the format everyone at work sends?
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Because it is what the software on the machine saves by default, and defaults decide almost everything about which formats spread. The awkward cases are the predictable ones: a recipient on different software, an older version, or a system that only accepts one specific format for upload. All three are one conversion away from working. RTF is Rich Text Format, Microsoft’s plain-text-encoded document interchange format from 1987.
Does anything still use RTF?
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Quite a lot, quietly. It is plain text with formatting markup written in it, so it can be generated by a program with no document library at all — which is why database exports, legal templating systems and the simple editors bundled with operating systems still emit it. As a format to edit in it is dated; as a lowest-common-denominator interchange file it still works everywhere. RTF opens in essentially every word processor ever written, including WordPad, TextEdit and thirty-year-old software.
What if my RTF is a scan rather than real text?
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Then nothing downstream can read it until OCR has run. A scanned page is a picture of words: it looks fine, and searching, copying or converting to an editable document all come back empty. Optical character recognition adds a real text layer over the image, after which the words are selectable and the conversion produces an actual document instead of a wrapper around a photograph.
What happens to embedded images and tables in an RTF?
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They come across, with the layout re-derived rather than copied. Pictures keep their resolution and their anchor; tables keep their cells and normally their borders. What moves is the fine positioning — a figure pinned beside a paragraph can end up above or below it once the text reflows at a different page size. A document where that matters is one to export to a fixed layout instead.
Does an RTF have fixed pages?
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No — content flows, and pages appear only when something decides on a page size. Change the font, the margins or the screen and the page numbering changes with it. That is why a page reference from an RTF is unreliable, and why converting to a fixed-layout format is the step that makes page numbers mean something.
Should I still be saving new files as RTF?
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Only if something downstream demands it. The format still opens, and there is no urgency about converting an archive that is not causing trouble, but it is no longer where the tooling or the efficiency is going. For anything new, a current format costs nothing extra and avoids the next round of this question a few years from now.
Does it matter that RTF is over thirty years old?
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Age itself is not the problem — several formats from that era are still perfectly good, precisely because everything has had decades to implement them. What matters is what the era assumed: small files, modest processors, no network, and features nobody needed yet. Where those assumptions still fit, the format is fine. Where they do not, that is the reason to convert.
Can I keep editing after converting my RTF?
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That depends entirely on the target. Converting to another editable document format keeps the structure — styles, headings, tables — so work continues normally. Converting to a page or image format produces something for reading rather than writing, and getting back from there means a second conversion that reconstructs structure rather than restoring it. Keep the RTF as the working copy either way.
Do I need the Microsoft software that made this RTF?
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Not to convert it. The format is Microsoft's and its own applications handle it best, but the file is readable by other tools and the conversion here runs server-side — nothing is installed and no licence is needed. Fidelity is the honest caveat: features specific to the original application are approximated rather than reproduced exactly.
