This serves only to delimit a control word and is ignored in subsequent processing. The marks the end of the control word’s name and can be one of the following:

The ASCII Letter Sequence can contain ASCII Alphabets (a through z and A through Z). A control word is defined by:Įach control word is case sensitive and starts with a backslash. These represent specially formatted command used to mark characters for display and can not be longer than 32 letters. These act as the building blocks for representation of RTF data as understandable text and character encoding. RTF files use 7-bit ASCII plain text, consisting of: Newer versions of Word can read RTF files generated with previous versions, while the older versions ignore control words and groups they don’t understand. A standard RTF file consists of ASCII to represent rich text and with non-ASCII characters that is converted to appropriate code values. This is achieved using control words that were introduced by Microsoft Office Word up through 2007. RTF serves as a standard of data transfer between word processing software and transfer of content from one operating system to another. At present, almost all operating systems have more feature rich applications that have minimized/eradicated the use of RTF file format. No more enhancements to the specifications are made after this. The final version of specifications, 1.9.1 was published by Microsoft in Mar 2008. Its official version for read/write was published as part of Microsoft Word 3.0 for Macintosh with version 1.0 specifications. RTF file format has underwent several revisions since its publication. The file format specifications are available by Microsoft for public download and can be referred to from developer’s perspective. This capability makes it a standard of data transfer between word processing software and, hence, contents can be transferred from one operating system to another without losing document formatting. The format facilitates cross-platform document exchange with other Microsoft Products, thus serving the purpose of interoperability.

Introduced and documented by Microsoft, the Rich Text Format ( RTF) represents a method of encoding formatted text and graphics for use within applications.

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