Editing Rich Text Format (section)

==Human readability==
RTF is a data format for saving and sharing documents, not a [[markup language]]; it is not intended for intuitive and easy typing.<ref name="rtf-pocket-guide" /><ref name="rtf-pocket-scribd">{{citation |url=https://www.scribd.com/doc/15490806/RTF-Pocket-Guide-by-OReilly-Media |title=RTF Pocket Guide by O'Reilly Media  |access-date=2010-03-13}}</ref> Nonetheless, unlike many word processing formats, RTF code can be [[human-readable]]. When an RTF file containing mostly Latin characters without [[diacritic]]s is viewed as a plain text file, the underlying ASCII text is readable, provided that the author has kept formatting concise.

When RTF was released, most word processors used binary file formats; Microsoft Word, for example, used the [[Doc (computing)|.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 the corresponding plain text.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://interglacial.com/rtf/ |title=Rich Text Format&nbsp;– MSWord generates some scary RTF |date=2008-07-12 |author=Sean M. Burke |access-date=2010-03-13}}</ref><ref name="rtf-pocket-guide" />

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 [[diacritic]]s 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, is used for [[CJK characters|吻]]. From the beginning, RTF has also supported Microsoft [[Object Linking and Embedding|OLE]] embedded objects and Macintosh Edition Manager subscriber objects, which are not human-readable.