À propos des fichiers RTF

RTF (Rich Text Format · Format de document)

Lancement 1987 Par Microsoft

Rich Text Format (.rtf) est un format de fichier pris en charge par KaijuConverter pour l’archivage, l’échange professionnel et la conversion multiplateforme.

Famille

Documents & Text

Extension

.rtf

Type MIME

application/rtf, text/rtf

Utilisable comme

Entrée Sortie

L'histoire

COMMENT RTF
A VU LE JOUR.

1987

2008

RTF — Rich Text Format — was Microsoft’s 1987 solution to a simple problem: how do you exchange formatted documents between Word on DOS, Word on Mac, and all the other word processors of the era? The answer was an ASCII-only markup language that encoded everything in curly braces and backslash commands. A .rtf file is still just plain text you can read in Notepad: \b bolds the next word, \fs24 sets 12-point, and so on.

For two decades RTF was the lowest common denominator between editors. Email clients used it for rich-text messages, clipboard formats on Windows carried RTF snippets, and tax forms on OS X shipped as .rtf. Microsoft updated the spec until RTF 1.9.1 in 2008 — then stopped, and never reached 2.0. RTF is now a fossil but a useful one: any text editor on Earth can at least open it.

CURIOSITÉS ET
ANECDOTES.

An .rtf file is pure ASCII — open it in Notepad and every formatting command is visible as a backslash keyword.

The entire RTF 1.9 specification is a single 283-page PDF — tiny compared to DOCX's 6 000 pages.

Microsoft abandoned RTF 2.0 in 2008; the last official spec remains 1.9.1.

Apple's TextEdit app on macOS defaults to saving as .rtf because the format is considered "safe".

RTF's limited feature set made it a popular choice for prosecutors delivering evidence, because it cannot hide tracked changes or metadata.

POINTS FORTS ET
LIMITES.

Points forts

Plain ASCII — portable, grep-able, and diff-friendly.
Supported by every word processor on every OS since 1990.
Cannot carry macros or embedded code — relatively safe to open.
Simple enough to parse by hand or generate with a small script.
Good interchange format when DOCX compatibility is shaky.

Limites

Frozen in 2008 — no modern features (no comments, poor styles, no track changes).
File sizes are bigger than DOCX for the same content (no compression).
Images are base64-encoded inline, inflating files further.
Visual fidelity drifts between Word versions despite the spec.

Tailles et poids typiques

Short formatted letter

15-50 KB

20-page report with styling

150 KB - 1 MB

Document with embedded images

2-20 MB

Spécifications techniques

MIME type: application/rtf
Extensions: .rtf
Standard: RTF Specification 1.9.1 (2008)
Character set: ASCII with Unicode escapes (\u)

CONVERTIR DEPUIS
RTF

rtf jpg rtf png rtf webp rtf gif rtf bmp rtf tiff rtf pdf rtf docx rtf odt rtf txt rtf md rtf html rtf epub rtf rst rtf adoc rtf org rtf textile rtf mediawiki rtf man rtf opml rtf t2t rtf dokuwiki rtf jira rtf creole rtf muse

Cas d'usage courants

Cross-platform text sharing, simple formatted documents.