RTF (usually referred to as such) stands for Rich Text Format, a document file format developed by Microsoft that most text processing programs are able to read and write. RTF is a poorly standardised format with incompatibilities reported even between different Microsoft applications, and tends to be rarely used for document distribution.

The simple example of an RTF file:

{\\rtf
 Hello
 \\par
 This is a
 little {\\b text}.
 \\par
 The End
}
will show as
Hello
This is a little text.
The End

Paragraphs have to be explicitly marked with \\par and {\\b ....} marks bold text. This syntax is similar to that of TeX.

The RTF format is the default rich text format for Mac OS X's default editor TextEdit and Microsoft Window's default editor WordPad.

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