Acronym and FileExtension for Rich Text Format.

A Microsoft standard for document interchange. It is a plain text mark-up language, although binary objects can be embedded in it. It is fairly widely supported amongst word processors, although as might be expected Microsoft's own products insert and understand some tags that aren't mentioned in the publicly available standard...

Some linux programs that can create RTF files include enscript(1)? and sgml2rtf(1)? (part of the linuxdoc-tools package in Debian), while OpenOffice can read and write RTF.

You can also give an RTF file a ".DOC" extension and then MicrosoftWindows users will be able to transparently open it in MicrosoftWord, blissfully unaware what format the file is actually in.

Sample RTF code

{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\deff0\deflang1033{

\fonttbl{\f0\fswiss\fprq2\fcharset0 Arial;}{\f1\fnil\fcharset2 Symbol;}}

{\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;\red0\green0\blue255;} \viewkind4\uc1\pard\qc\b\f0\fs52 Heading\up28\'ae\up0

Paragraph1 ...

\par Paragraph2 \par

snip...

}