RTF Pocket Guide

Chapter 1. RTF Tutorial

This book is a convenient reference for Rich Text Format (RTF). It covers the essentials of RTF, especially the parts that you need to know if you’re writing a program to generate RTF files. This book is also a useful introduction to parsing RTF, although that is a more complex task.

RTF is a document format. RTF is not intended to be a markup language anyone would use for coding entire documents by hand (although it has been done!). Instead, it’s meant to be a format for document data that all sorts of programs can read and write. For example, if you even just skim this book, you should be able to write a program (in the programming language of your choice) that can analyze the contents of a database and produce a summary of it as an RTF document with whatever kinds of formatting you want. The flexibility of RTF makes it an ideal format for everything from generating invoices or sales reports, to producing dictionaries based on databases of words.

This book is not a complete reference to every last feature of RTF; Microsoft’s comprehensive but terse Rich Text Format (RTF) Specification is the closest you will find to that. The current version (v1.7) is available at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnrtfspec/html/rtfspec.asp. In the Microsoft Knowledgebase at support.microsoft.com, its access number is 269575. Version 1.5 of the specification and before are more verbose, and might be more useful. Microsoft doesn’t distribute copies of them anymore, but ...