Rich Text Format (RTF) is another proprietary Microsoft format, with a published specification that can be used to create documents. Originally, its syntax was influenced by the TeX language that was mostly developed by Donald Knuth as it was intended to be cross-platform. The first reader and writer was released with the Microsoft Word product for Macintosh computers. Unlike the other document formats we've described, it is actually human-readable in usual text editors, without any preprocessing required.
Apart from the actual text, all RTF documents are implemented using the following elements:
- Control words: Prepended by a backslash and ending with a delimiter, these are special commands that may have certain states represented by a number. The following are some examples:
- \rtfN: The starting control word that can be found at the beginning of any RTF document, where N represents the major format version (currently, this is 1)
- \ansi: One of the supported character...
