The Rich Text Format (often abbreviated RTF ) is a proprietary document file format with published specification developed by Microsoft Corporation from 1987 until 2008 for cross-platform document interchange with Microsoft products. Prior to 2008, Microsoft published updated specifications for RTF with major revisions of Microsoft Word and Office versions.
79-470: Most word processors are able to read and write some versions of RTF. There are several different revisions of RTF specification; portability of files will depend on what version of RTF is being used. RTF should not be confused with enriched text or its predecessor Rich Text, or with IBM's RFT-DCA (Revisable Format Text-Document Content Architecture), as these are different specifications. Richard Brodie , Charles Simonyi , and David Luebbert, members of
158-655: A " .txt " file, or a TXT Record generally contains only plain text (without formatting) intended for humans to read. The best format for storing knowledge persistently is plain text, rather than some binary format . Before the early 1960s, computers were mainly used for number-crunching rather than for text, and memory was extremely expensive. Computers often allocated only 6 bits for each character, permitting only 64 characters—assigning codes for A-Z, a-z, and 0-9 would leave only 2 codes: nowhere near enough. Most computers opted not to support lower-case letters. Thus, early text projects such as Roberto Busa 's Index Thomisticus ,
237-414: A "literary piano". The only "word processing" these mechanical systems could perform was to change where letters appeared on the page, to fill in spaces that were previously left on the page, or to skip over lines. It was not until decades later that the introduction of electricity and electronics into typewriters began to help the writer with the mechanical part. The term “word processing” (translated from
316-499: A RTF document is opened in software that does not support the picture type of an inserted picture, the picture is not displayed. RTF writers usually either convert an inserted picture in an unsupported picture type to one in a supported picture type, or do not include picture at all. For better compatibility with Microsoft products, some RTF writers include the same picture in two different picture types in one RTF file: one supported picture type to display, and one uncompressed WMF copy of
395-802: A Unicode character is outside BMP , it is encoded with a surrogate pair. Support for Unicode was made due to text handling changes in Microsoft Word – Microsoft Word 97 is a partially Unicode-enabled application and it handles text using the 16-bit Unicode character encoding scheme . Microsoft Word 2000 and later versions are Unicode-enabled applications that handle text using the 16-bit Unicode character encoding scheme. Because RTF files are usually 7-bit ASCII plain text , they can be easily transmitted between PC-based operating systems. Converters that communicate with Microsoft Word for MS Windows or Macintosh generally expect data transfer as 8-bit characters and binary data which can contain any 8-bit values. RTF
474-510: A backslash and typewriter apostrophe denote a character taken from a Windows code page. For example, if the code page is set to Windows-1256 , the sequence \'c8 will encode the Arabic letter bāʼ ب. It is also possible to specify a "Character Set" in the preamble of the RTF document and associate it to a header. For example, the preamble has the text \f3\fnil\fcharset128 , then, in the body of
553-504: A binary integer that is not a character, is a binary file. Converting a plain text file to a different character encoding does not change the meaning of the text, as long as the correct character encoding is used. However, converting a binary file to a different format may alter the interpretation of the non-textual data. According to The Unicode Standard: According to other definitions, however, files that contain markup or other meta-data are generally considered plain text, so long as
632-656: A computer-based word processing dedicated device with Japanese writing system in Business Show in Tokyo. Toshiba released the first Japanese word processor JW-10 [ jp ] in February 1979. The price was 6,300,000 JPY, equivalent to US$ 45,000. This is selected as one of the milestones of IEEE . The Japanese writing system uses a large number of kanji (logographic Chinese characters) which require 2 bytes to store, so having one key per each symbol
711-473: A document being opened is in a format that does not match the format implied by the file's extension, and giving the option to abort opening that file. One exploit attacking a vulnerability was patched in Microsoft Word in April 2015. Since 2014 there have been malware RTF files embedding OpenXML exploits. Each RTF implementation usually implements only some versions or subsets of the RTF specification. Many of
790-544: A document is received without any explicit indication of the character encoding, some applications use charset detection to attempt to guess what encoding was used. ASCII reserves the first 32 codes (numbers 0–31 decimal) for control characters known as the "C0 set": codes originally intended not to represent printable information, but rather to control devices (such as printers ) that make use of ASCII, or to provide meta-information about data streams such as those stored on magnetic tape. They include common characters like
869-469: A particular OLE object is not available, the object is displayed using a picture of the object which is embedded along with it. RTF supports inclusion of JPEG, PNG, Enhanced Metafile (EMF), Windows Metafile (WMF), Apple PICT, Windows device-dependent bitmap, Windows device-independent bitmap and OS/2 Metafile picture types in hexadecimal (the default) or binary format in a RTF file. Not all of these picture types are supported in all RTF readers, however. When
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#1732779519666948-422: A safe file, since Microsoft Word will open standard DOC files renamed with an RTF extension and run any contained macros as usual. Manual examination of a file in a plain text editor such as Notepad , or use of the file command in a UNIX -like systems, is required to determine whether or not a suspect file is really RTF. Enabling Word's "Confirm file format conversion on open" option can also assist by warning
1027-552: A set of stick-on "keycaps" describing the function were provided with the software. Lexitype was popular with large organizations that had previously used the Lexitron. Eventually, the price differences between dedicated word processors and general-purpose PCs, and the value added to the latter by software such as “ killer app ” spreadsheet applications, e.g. VisiCalc and Lotus 1-2-3 , were so compelling that personal computers and word processing software became serious competition for
1106-456: A typewriter) was patented in 1714 by Henry Mill for a machine that was capable of "writing so clearly and accurately you could not distinguish it from a printing press". More than a century later, another patent appeared in the name of William Austin Burt for the typographer . In the late 19th century, Christopher Latham Sholes created the first recognizable typewriter, which was described as
1185-716: A useful format for basic formatted text documents such as instruction manuals, résumés, letters, and modest information documents. These documents, at minimum, support bold, italic and underline text formatting. Also typically supported are left-, center- and right-aligned text, font specification and document margins. Font and margin defaults, style presets and other functions vary according to program defaults. There may also be incompatibilities between different RTF versions, e.g. between RTF 1.0 1987 and later specifications, or between RTF 1.0–1.4 and RTF 1.5+ in use of Unicode characters. And though RTF supports metadata like title and author, not all implementations support this. Nevertheless,
1264-504: A user to rewrite text that had been written on another tape, and it also allowed limited collaboration in the sense that a user could send the tape to another person to let them edit the document or make a copy. It was a revolution for the word processing industry. In 1969, the tapes were replaced by magnetic cards. These memory cards were inserted into an extra device that accompanied the MT/ST, able to read and record users' work. Throughout
1343-910: A variation on footnotes, so applications that support footnotes but not endnotes will render an endnote as a footnote. Microsoft products do not support comments within footers, footnotes or headers. Similarly, Microsoft products do not support footnotes in headers, footers, or comments. Inserting a comment or a footnote in one of these disallowed contexts may result in a corrupted document. The RTF 1.2 specification defined use of drawing objects, known as shapes, such as rectangles, ellipses, lines, arrows and polygons. The RTF 1.5 specification introduced many new control words for drawing objects. However, many RTF implementations, such as Apache OpenOffice , do not support drawing objects (though they are supported in LibreOffice 4.0 on) or Abiword. Applications which do not support RTF drawing objects do not display or save
1422-417: A word processor and a desktop publishing program has become unclear as word processing software has gained features such as ligature support added to the 2010 version of Microsoft Word . Common word processor programs include LibreOffice Writer , Google Docs and Microsoft Word . Word processors developed from mechanical machines, later merging with computer technology. The history of word processing
1501-418: Is a data format for saving and sharing documents, not a markup language ; it is not intended for intuitive and easy typing. Nonetheless, unlike many word processing formats, RTF code can be human-readable . When an RTF file containing mostly Latin characters without diacritics is viewed as a plain text file, the underlying ASCII text is readable, provided that the author has kept formatting concise. When RTF
1580-426: Is a loose term for data (e.g. file contents) that represent only characters of readable material but not its graphical representation nor other objects ( floating-point numbers , images, etc.). It may also include a limited number of "whitespace" characters that affect simple arrangement of text, such as spaces, line breaks, or tabulation characters. Plain text is different from formatted text , where style information
1659-499: Is also known as "Latin-1", and covers the needs of most (not all) European languages that use Latin-based characters (there was not quite enough room to cover them all). ISO 2022 then provided conventions for "switching" between different character sets in mid-file. Many other organisations developed variations on these, and for many years Windows and Macintosh computers used incompatible variations. The text-encoding situation became more and more complex, leading to efforts by ISO and by
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#17327795196661738-599: Is also the data format for "rich text controls" in MS Windows APIs. The default text editor for macOS , TextEdit , can also view, edit and save RTF files as well as RTFD files, and uses the format as its default. As of July 2009, TextEdit has limited ability to edit RTF document margins. Much older Mac word processing application programs such as MacWrite and WriteNow had the same RTF abilities as TextEdit has. The following free and open-source word processors attempt to work with Microsoft's RTF file format, see
1817-561: Is an API enabling developers to create RTF documents with PHP . Pandoc is an open source document converter with multiple output formats, including RTF. RTFGen is a project to create RTF documents via pure PHP . rtf.js is a JavaScript based library to render RTF documents in HTML. The macOS command line tool textutil can convert files between rtf, rtfd, text, doc, docx, wordml, odt and webarchive formats. The editor Ted can also convert RTF files to HTML and PS format. The Rich Text Format
1896-441: Is an open-source program to convert RTF into HTML, LaTeX, troff macros and other formats. pyth is a Python library to create and convert documents in RTF, XHTML and PDF format. Ruby RTF is a project to create Rich Text content via Ruby . RaTFink is a library of Tcl routines, free software, to generate RTF output, and a Cost script to convert SGML to RTF. RTF::Writer is a Perl module for generating RTF documents. PHPRtfLite
1975-422: Is considered plain text regardless of its encoding. To properly understand or process it the recipient must know (or be able to figure out) what encoding was used; however, they need not know anything about the computer architecture that was used, or about the binary structures defined by whatever program (if any) created the data. Perhaps the most common way of explicitly stating the specific encoding of plain text
2054-717: Is included; from structured text, where structural parts of the document such as paragraphs, sections, and the like are identified; and from binary files in which some portions must be interpreted as binary objects (encoded integers, real numbers, images, etc.). The term is sometimes used quite loosely, to mean files that contain only "readable" content (or just files with nothing that the speaker does not prefer). For example, that could exclude any indication of fonts or layout (such as markup, markdown, or even tabs); characters such as curly quotes, non-breaking spaces, soft hyphens, em dashes, and/or ligatures; or other things. In principle, plain text can be in any encoding , but occasionally
2133-600: Is infeasible. Japanese word processing became possible with the development of the Japanese input method (a sequence of keypresses, with visual feedback, which selects a character) -- now widely used in personal computers. Oki launched OKI WORD EDITOR-200 in March 1979 with this kana-based keyboard input system. In 1980 several electronics and office equipment brands including entered this rapidly growing market with more compact and affordable devices. For instance, NEC introduced
2212-405: Is one of three things: As an example, the following RTF code would be rendered as follows: This is some bold text. A standard RTF file can only consist of 7-bit ASCII characters, but can use escape sequences to encode other characters. The two character escapes are code page escapes and, starting with RTF 1.5, Unicode escapes. In a code page escape, two hexadecimal digits following
2291-618: Is primarily independence from programs that require their very own special encoding or formatting or file format . Plain text files can be opened, read, and edited with ubiquitous text editors and utilities. A command-line interface allows people to give commands in plain text and get a response, also typically in plain text. Many other computer programs are also capable of processing or creating plain text, such as countless programs in DOS , Windows , classic Mac OS , and Unix and its kin; as well as web browsers (a few browsers such as Lynx and
2370-417: Is programmed using groups, a backslash, a control word and a delimiter. Groups are contained within curly braces ({}) and indicate which attributes should be applied to certain text. The backslash (\) introduces a control word, which is a specifically programmed command for RTF. Control words can have certain states in which they are active. These states are represented by numbers. For example, A delimiter
2449-467: Is still dependent on the specific RTF version in use. There are several consciously designed or accidentally born RTF dialects. RTF is the internal markup language used by Microsoft Word. Since 1987, RTF files have been able to be transferred back and forth between many old and new computer systems (and now over the Internet), despite differences between operating systems and their versions. This makes it
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2528-462: Is still plain text. The use of plain text rather than binary files enables files to survive much better "in the wild", in part by making them largely immune to computer architecture incompatibilities. For example, all the problems of Endianness can be avoided (with encodings such as UCS-2 rather than UTF-8, endianness matters, but uniformly for every character, rather than for potentially-unknown subsets of it). The purpose of using plain text today
2607-467: Is the story of the gradual automation of the physical aspects of writing and editing, and then to the refinement of the technology to make it available to corporations and Individuals. The term word processing appeared in American offices in the early 1970s centered on the idea of streamlining the work to typists, but the meaning soon shifted toward the automation of the whole editing cycle. At first,
2686-555: Is used for 吻 . From the beginning, RTF has also supported Microsoft OLE embedded objects and Macintosh Edition Manager subscriber objects, which are not human-readable. Most word processing software support either RTF format importing and exporting for some RTF specification or direct editing, which makes it a "common" format between otherwise incompatible word processing software and operating systems. Most applications that read RTF files silently ignore unknown RTF control words. These factors contribute to its interoperability , though it
2765-464: Is with a MIME type . For email and HTTP , the default MIME type is " text/plain " -- plain text without markup. Another MIME type often used in both email and HTTP is " text/html ; charset=UTF-8" -- plain text represented using the UTF-8 character encoding with HTML markup. Another common MIME type is "application/json" -- plain text represented using the UTF-8 character encoding with JSON markup. When
2844-684: The Brown Corpus , and others had to resort to conventions such as keying an asterisk preceding letters actually intended to be upper-case. Fred Brooks of IBM argued strongly for going to 8-bit bytes, because someday people might want to process text, and won. Although IBM used EBCDIC , most text from then on came to be encoded in ASCII , using values from 0 to 31 for (non-printing) control characters , and values from 32 to 127 for graphic characters such as letters, digits, and punctuation. Most machines stored characters in 8 bits rather than 7, ignoring
2923-877: The Gypsy word processor). These were popularized by MacWrite on the Apple Macintosh in 1983, and Microsoft Word on the IBM PC in 1984. These were probably the first true WYSIWYG word processors to become known to many people. Of particular interest also is the standardization of TrueType fonts used in both Macintosh and Windows PCs. While the publishers of the operating systems provide TrueType typefaces, they are largely gathered from traditional typefaces converted by smaller font publishing houses to replicate standard fonts. Demand for new and interesting fonts, which can be found free of copyright restrictions, or commissioned from font designers, developed. The growing popularity of
3002-496: The Line Mode Browser produce only plain text for display) and other e-text readers. Plain text files are almost universal in programming; a source code file containing instructions in a programming language is almost always a plain text file. Plain text is also commonly used for configuration files , which are read for saved settings at the startup of a program. Plain text is used for much e-mail . A comment ,
3081-474: The Microsoft Word development team, developed the original RTF in the middle to late 1980s. The first RTF reader and writer shipped in 1987 as part of Microsoft Word 3.0 for Macintosh , which implemented the RTF version 1.0 specification. All subsequent releases of Microsoft Word for Macintosh, as well as all Windows versions, can read and write in RTF format. Microsoft maintains RTF. The final version
3160-612: The NWP-20 [ jp ] , and Fujitsu launched the Fujitsu OASYS [ jp ] . While the average unit price in 1980 was 2,000,000 JPY (US$ 14,300), it was dropped to 164,000 JPY (US$ 1,200) in 1985. Even after personal computers became widely available, Japanese word processors remained popular as they tended to be more portable (an "office computer" was initially too large to carry around), and become commonplace for business and academics, even for private individuals in
3239-519: The Unicode Consortium to develop a single, unified character encoding that could cover all known (or at least all currently known) languages. After some conflict, these efforts were unified. Unicode currently allows for 1,114,112 code values, and assigns codes covering nearly all modern text writing systems, as well as many historical ones, and for many non-linguistic characters such as printer's dingbats , mathematical symbols, etc. Text
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3318-408: The newline and the tab character . In 8-bit character sets such as Latin-1 and the other ISO 8859 sets, the first 32 characters of the "upper half" (128 to 159) are also control codes, known as the "C1 set". They are rarely used directly; when they turn up in documents which are ostensibly in an ISO 8859 encoding, their code positions generally refer instead to the characters at that position in
3397-406: The $ 10,000 range. Cheap general-purpose personal computers were still the domain of hobbyists. In Japan, even though typewriters with Japanese writing system had widely been used for businesses and governments, they were limited to specialists and required special skills due to the wide variety of letters, until computer-based devices came onto the market. In 1977, Sharp showcased a prototype of
3476-612: The 1960s and 70s, word processing began to slowly shift from glorified typewriters augmented with electronic features to become fully computer-based (although only with single-purpose hardware) with the development of several innovations. Just before the arrival of the personal computer (PC), IBM developed the floppy disk . In the 1970s, the first proper word-processing systems appeared, which allowed display and editing of documents on CRT screens . During this era, these early stand-alone word processing systems were designed, built, and marketed by several pioneering companies. Linolex Systems
3555-533: The German word Textverarbeitung ) itself was possibly created in the 1950s by Ulrich Steinhilper , a German IBM typewriter sales executive, or by an American electro-mechanical typewriter executive, George M. Ryan, who obtained a trademark registration in the USPTO for the phrase. However, it did not make its appearance in 1960s office management or computing literature (an example of grey literature ), though many of
3634-484: The RTF format is consistent enough to be considered highly portable and acceptable for cross-platform use. Microsoft Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) objects and Macintosh Edition Manager subscriber objects allow embedding of other files inside the RTF, such as tables or charts from spreadsheet application. However, since these objects are not widely supported in programs for viewing or editing RTF files, they also limit RTF's interoperability. If software that understands
3713-557: The RTF specification, Microsoft's own applications had a lead in time-to-market, because competitors had to redevelop their applications after studying the newer version of the format. Novell alleged that Microsoft's practices were anticompetitive in its 2004 antitrust complaint against Microsoft. Word processor A word processor ( WP ) is a device or computer program that provides for input, editing, formatting, and output of text, often with some additional features. Early word processors were stand-alone devices dedicated to
3792-581: The WMF copy. RTF supports embedding of fonts used in the document, but this feature is not widely supported in software implementations. RTF also supports generic font family names used for font substitution : roman ( serif ), Swiss ( sans-serif ), modern ( monospace ), script , decorative and technical . This feature is not widely supported either. Since RTF 1.0, the RTF specification has supported document annotations/comments. The RTF 1.7 specification defined some new features for annotations, including
3871-498: The Windows operating system in the 1990s later took Microsoft Word along with it. Originally called "Microsoft Multi-Tool Word", this program quickly became a synonym for “word processor”. Early in the 21st century, Google Docs popularized the transition to online or offline web browser based word processing. This was enabled by the widespread adoption of suitable internet connectivity in businesses and domestic households and later
3950-762: The available RTF converters cannot understand all new features in the latest RTF specifications. The WordPad editor in Microsoft Windows creates RTF files by default. It once defaulted to the Microsoft Word 6.0 file format, but write support for Word documents (.doc) was dropped in a security update. Read support was also dropped in Windows 7. WordPad does not support some RTF features, such as headers and footers. However, WordPad can read and save many RTF features that it cannot create, including tables, strikeout, superscript, subscript, "extra" colors, text background colors, numbered lists, right or left indent, quasi-hypertext and URL linking, and various line spacings. RTF
4029-416: The corresponding plain text. To be standard-compliant RTF, non-ASCII characters must be escaped. Thus, even with concise formatting, text that uses certain dashes and quotation marks is less legible. Latin languages with many diacritics are particularly difficult to read in RTF, as they result in substitutions like \'f1 for ñ and \'e9 for é . Non-Latin scripts are illegible in RTF — \u21563, for example,
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#17327795196664108-690: The criticism paragraph below. AbiWord , Apache OpenOffice , Bean , Calligra , Collabora Online and LibreOffice . Scrivener uses individual RTF files for all the text files that make up a given "project". SIL International 's freeware application for developing and publishing dictionaries uses RTF as its most common form of document output. RTF files produced by Toolbox are designed to be used in Microsoft Word , but can also be used by other RTF-aware word processors. RTF can be used on some ebook readers because of its interoperability, simplicity and low CPU processing requirements. The open-source script rtf2xml can partially convert RTF to XML. GNU UnRTF
4187-870: The date stamp (there was previously only "time stamp") and parents of annotations. When a RTF document with annotations is opened in an application that does not support RTF annotations, the annotations are not shown. Similarly, when a document with annotations is saved as RTF in an application that does not support RTF annotations, the annotations are not preserved in the RTF file. Some implementations, like Abiword (since version 2.8) and IBM Lotus Symphony (up to version 1.3), may hide annotations by default or require some user action to display them. The RTF specification also supports footnotes, which are widely supported in RTF implementations (e.g. in OpenOffice.org, Abiword, KWord, Ted, but not in Wordpad). Endnotes are implemented as
4266-486: The dedicated machines and soon dominated the market. In the late 1980s, innovations such as the advent of laser printers , a "typographic" approach to word processing ( WYSIWYG - What You See Is What You Get), using bitmap displays with multiple fonts (pioneered by the Xerox Alto computer and Bravo word processing program), and graphical user interfaces such as “copy and paste” (another Xerox PARC innovation, with
4345-587: The designers of word processing systems combined existing technologies with emerging ones to develop stand-alone equipment, creating a new business distinct from the emerging world of the personal computer. The concept of word processing arose from the more general data processing, which since the 1950s had been the application of computers to business administration. Through history, there have been three types of word processors: mechanical, electronic and software. The first word processing device (a "Machine for Transcribing Letters" that appears to have been similar to
4424-591: The document, the text \f3\'bd\'f0 will represent the code point 0xbd 0xf0 from the Character Set 128 (which corresponds to the Shift-JIS code page), which encodes "金". For a Unicode escape, the control word \u is used, followed by a 16-bit signed integer which corresponds to the Unicode UTF-16 code unit number. For the benefit of programs without Unicode support, this must be followed by
4503-417: The function, but current word processors are word processor programs running on general purpose computers. The functions of a word processor program fall somewhere between those of a simple text editor and a fully functioned desktop publishing program. While the distinction between a text editor and a word processor is clear—namely the capability of editing rich text —the distinctions between
4582-518: The ideas, products, and technologies to which it would later be applied were already well known. Nonetheless, by 1971, the term was recognized by the New York Times as a business " buzz word ". Word processing paralleled the more general "data processing", or the application of computers to business administration. Thus, by 1972, the discussion of word processing was common in publications devoted to business office management and technology; by
4661-399: The markup is also in a directly human-readable form (as in HTML, XML, and so on). Thus, representations such as SGML, RTF, HTML, XML, wiki markup , and TeX, as well as nearly all programming language source code files, are considered plain text. The particular content is irrelevant to whether a file is plain text. For example, an SVG file can express drawings or even bitmapped graphics, but
4740-617: The mid-1970s, the term would have been familiar to any office manager who consulted business periodicals. By the late 1960s, IBM had developed the IBM MT/ST (Magnetic Tape/Selectric Typewriter). It was a model of the IBM Selectric typewriter from earlier in 1961, but it came built into its own desk, integrated with magnetic tape recording and playback facilities along with controls and a bank of electrical relays. The MT/ST automated word wrap, but it had no screen. This device allowed
4819-883: The most popular systems of the 1970s and early 1980s. The Wang system displayed text on a CRT screen, and incorporated virtually every fundamental characteristic of word processors as they are known today. While early computerized word processor system were often expensive and hard to use (that is, like the computer mainframes of the 1960s), the Wang system was a true office machine, affordable to organizations such as medium-sized law firms, and easily mastered and operated by secretarial staff. The phrase "word processor" rapidly came to refer to CRT-based machines similar to Wang's. Numerous machines of this kind emerged, typically marketed by traditional office-equipment companies such as IBM, Lanier (AES Data machines - re-badged), CPT, and NBI. All were specialized, dedicated, proprietary systems, with prices in
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#17327795196664898-735: The nearest representation of this character in the specified code page. For example, \u1576? would give the Arabic letter bāʼ ب, but indicates that older programs which do not support Unicode should render it as a question mark instead. The control word \uc0 can be used to indicate that subsequent Unicode escape sequences within the current group do not specify the substitution character. Until RTF specification version 1.5 release in 1997, RTF only handled 7-bit characters directly and 8-bit characters encoded as hexadecimal (using \'xx ). Since RTF 1.5, however, RTF control words generally accept signed 16-bit numbers as arguments. Unicode values greater than 32767 must be expressed as negative numbers. If
4977-414: The original picture to improve compatibility with some Microsoft applications like Wordpad. This method increases the RTF file size dramatically. The RTF specification does not require this method, and several implementations do not include the WMF copy (e.g. Abiword or Ted). For Microsoft Word, it is also possible to set a specific registry value ("ExportPictureWithMetafile=0") to prevent Word from saving
5056-592: The popularity of smartphones . Google Docs enabled word processing from within any vendor's web browser, which could run on any vendor's operating system on any physical device type including tablets and smartphones, although offline editing is limited to a few Chromium based web browsers. Google Docs also enabled the significant growth of use of information technology such as remote access to files and collaborative real-time editing , both becoming simple to do with little or no need for costly software and specialist IT support. Plain text In computing , plain text
5135-412: The public. By the late 1970s, computerized word processors were still primarily used by employees composing documents for large and midsized businesses (e.g., law firms and newspapers). Within a few years, the falling prices of PCs made word processing available for the first time to all writers in the convenience of their homes. The first word processing program for personal computers ( microcomputers )
5214-599: The range from 128 to 255. Using values above 128 conflicts with using the 8th bit as a checksum, but the checksum usage gradually died out. These additional characters were encoded differently in different countries, making texts impossible to decode without figuring out the originator's rules. For instance, a browser might display ¬A rather than ` if it tried to interpret one character set as another. The International Organization for Standardization ( ISO ) eventually developed several code pages under ISO 8859 , to accommodate various languages. The first of these ( ISO 8859-1 )
5293-776: The remaining bit or using it as a checksum . The near-ubiquity of ASCII was a great help, but failed to address international and linguistic concerns. The dollar-sign ("$ ") was not as useful in England, and the accented characters used in Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian and many other languages were entirely unavailable in ASCII (not to mention characters used in Greek, Russian, and most Eastern languages). Many individuals, companies, and countries defined extra characters as needed—often reassigning control characters, or using values in
5372-496: The second half of the 1980s. The phrase "word processor" has been abbreviated as "Wa-pro" or "wapuro" in Japanese. The final step in word processing came with the advent of the personal computer in the late 1970s and 1980s and with the subsequent creation of word processing software. Word processing software that would create much more complex and capable output was developed and prices began to fall, making them more accessible to
5451-405: The shapes. Some implementations will also not display any text inside drawing objects. Unlike Microsoft Word's DOC format, as well as the newer Office Open XML and OpenDocument formats, RTF does not support macros . For this reason, RTF was often recommended over those formats when the spread of computer viruses through macros was a concern. However, having the .RTF extension does not guarantee
5530-434: The term is taken to imply ASCII . As Unicode -based encodings such as UTF-8 and UTF-16 become more common, that usage may be shrinking. Plain text is also sometimes used only to exclude "binary" files: those in which at least some parts of the file cannot be correctly interpreted via the character encoding in effect. For example, a file or string consisting of "hello" (in any encoding), following by 4 bytes that express
5609-464: The time, (about $ 60,000 adjusted for inflation). The Redactron Corporation (organized by Evelyn Berezin in 1969) designed and manufactured editing systems, including correcting/editing typewriters, cassette and card units, and eventually a word processor called the Data Secretary. The Burroughs Corporation acquired Redactron in 1976. A CRT-based system by Wang Laboratories became one of
5688-513: Was Electric Pencil , from Michael Shrayer Software , which went on sale in December 1976. In 1978, WordStar appeared and because of its many new features soon dominated the market. WordStar was written for the early CP/M (Control Program–Micro) operating system, ported to CP/M-86 , then to MS-DOS , and was the most popular word processing program until 1985 when WordPerfect sales first exceeded WordStar sales. Early word processing software
5767-635: Was 1.9.1 in 2008, which implemented features of Office 2007 . Microsoft has discontinued enhancements to the RTF specification, so features new to Word 2010 or a later version will not save properly to RTF. Microsoft anticipates no further updates to RTF, but has stated willingness to consider editorial and other non-substantive modifications of the RTF Specification during an associated ISO/IEC 29500 balloting period. RTF files were used to produce Windows Help files, though these have since been superseded by Microsoft Compiled HTML Help files. It
5846-449: Was founded in 1970 by James Lincoln and Robert Oleksiak. Linolex based its technology on microprocessors, floppy drives and software. It was a computer-based system for application in the word processing businesses and it sold systems through its own sales force. With a base of installed systems in over 500 sites, Linolex Systems sold 3 million units in 1975 — a year before the Apple computer
5925-596: Was not as intuitive as word processor devices. Most early word processing software required users to memorize semi-mnemonic key combinations rather than pressing keys such as "copy" or "bold". Moreover, CP/M lacked cursor keys; for example WordStar used the E-S-D-X-centered "diamond" for cursor navigation. A notable exception was the software Lexitype for MS-DOS that took inspiration from the Lexitron dedicated word processor's user interface and which mapped individual functions to particular keyboard function keys , and
6004-486: Was released, most word processors used binary file formats; Microsoft Word, for example, used the .DOC file format. RTF was unique in its simple formatting control which allowed non-RTF aware programs like Microsoft Notepad to open and provide readable files. Today, most word processors have moved to XML-based file formats (Word has switched to the .docx file format). Regardless, these files contain large amounts of formatting code, so are often ten or more times larger than
6083-495: Was released. At that time, the Lexitron Corporation also produced a series of dedicated word-processing microcomputers. Lexitron was the first to use a full-sized video display screen (CRT) in its models by 1978. Lexitron also used 5 1 ⁄ 4 inch floppy diskettes, which became the standard in the personal computer field. The program disk was inserted in one drive, and the system booted up . The data diskette
6162-441: Was the standard file format for text-based documents in applications developed for Microsoft Windows. Microsoft did not initially make the RTF specification publicly available, making it difficult for competitors to develop document conversion features in their applications. Because Microsoft's developers had access to the specification, Microsoft's applications had better compatibility with the format. Also, each time Microsoft changed
6241-414: Was then put in the second drive. The operating system and the word processing program were combined in one file. Another of the early word processing adopters was Vydec, which created in 1973 the first modern text processor, the "Vydec Word Processing System". It had built-in multiple functions like the ability to share content by diskette and print it. The Vydec Word Processing System sold for $ 12,000 at
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