The Rich Text Format (often abbreviated to '''RTF''') is a proprietary document file format developed and owned by Microsoft since 1987 for cross-platform document interchange. Most word processors are able to read and write RTF documents. Unlike most of the word processing formats, RTF is human-readable (though machine-generated RTF such as produced by Word has a very high and obfuscating code-to-text ratio), and it's also human-''writable'': once you get used to it it's like a poor man's LaTeX (a very poor man's). RTF is also the basis for Windows Help ([Winhelp]) format.

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See also [Ratfink], a Tcl library for generating RTF files.

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O'Reilly has an RTF pocket guide [http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/rtfpg/], the only book I ([EKB]) know of that documents the RTF format.

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