Download Sample RTF Files

RTF (Rich Text Format) is a document format developed by Microsoft in 1987. Unlike DOCX, which is a ZIP archive of XML files, RTF is a plain-text format — you can open it in any text editor and read the raw markup. Despite being plain text, it encodes rich formatting: fonts, font sizes, bold, italic, colors, paragraph alignment, margins, tables, and more using backslash control words like \b for bold and \fs24 for 12pt font size.

RTF opens natively in Microsoft Word, LibreOffice Writer, Apple TextEdit (macOS and iOS), WordPad (Windows), Google Docs (via import), and virtually every word processor released in the last 30 years. This near-universal compatibility is what makes it a useful test fixture — it's the most portable rich text format that doesn't require a specialized parser.

The registered MIME type for RTF is application/rtf. You may also encounter text/rtf and text/richtext in older systems — both refer to the same format but application/rtf is the correct modern type per RFC 7763. If you're building an upload handler that accepts RTF files, validate for application/rtf as the primary type and consider also accepting text/rtf for compatibility with older clients that may send the legacy MIME type.

RTF was originally designed for ASCII, so Unicode characters require special encoding. The \uN control word inserts a Unicode character by decimal code point — for example, \u233 represents é (e with acute accent). This is followed by a fallback character for older readers that don't support Unicode, typically a question mark (?) or an ASCII approximation. For CJK characters (Chinese, Japanese, Korean), RTF uses double-byte escape sequences (\'XX\'XX). The Unicode Heavy template on this page demonstrates the correct encoding for Latin extended, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, CJK, and emoji characters, making it a practical fixture for testing whether your RTF parser handles the \uN escape sequences correctly.

DOCX (Office Open XML) is a ZIP archive containing XML files and is the current Microsoft Word format since 2007. RTF is a single plain-text file using backslash escape sequences, and is the older format dating to 1987. DOCX supports more advanced features (tracked changes, complex styles, embedded objects, macros) but requires a ZIP-aware parser. RTF is simpler to parse because it's a single flat file, but the control word syntax is verbose and the specification has grown complex over 35+ years. For testing purposes, RTF is often preferable because you can inspect and edit the raw source directly, while DOCX requires unzipping to read its contents.

RTF tables are defined row-by-row using a combination of control words. Each row begins with \trowd (table row definition), followed by cell boundary positions set with \cellx values in twips (1 twip = 1/1440 inch). Cell content follows, with each cell terminated by \cell. The row ends with \row. Unlike HTML tables, RTF has no explicit concept of table start and end — the table is implied by consecutive rows using \trowd. This row-centric structure means RTF table parsers must track row context carefully, and deeply nested tables (tables inside table cells) are a common source of parser bugs, which is why the table-heavy edge case file is useful for testing.

Yes. Most Word-to-PDF conversion tools (LibreOffice headless, Pandoc, unoconv, Gotenberg) accept RTF as an input format alongside DOCX. The Formatted Document, Report, and Invoice templates all exercise the formatting features most likely to cause rendering differences between converters: font sizes, bold/italic, paragraph spacing, text colors, and table layout. The Tables template specifically tests whether the converter handles multi-column table cells and cell borders correctly. Flipper File also has a direct HTML to PDF tool if you want to test that direction instead.

The absolute minimum valid RTF document is {\rtf1} — 8 bytes. This is a well-formed RTF group containing only the version identifier \rtf1 with no content. The Minimal Valid RTF template on this page is slightly larger, adding a default font declaration and an empty paragraph, which is closer to what real-world parsers expect. Many parsers that handle {\rtf1} correctly will still fail on files missing a font table ({\fonttbl}), so the minimal template tests both the absolute minimum and the practical minimum.

Yes. The files are generated using RTF 1.5 control words, which are supported by every version of Microsoft Word from Word 97 onward. The Unicode escape sequences (\uN) were introduced in RTF 1.5 (Word 97), so the Unicode-heavy file requires at least that version. All other templates use only core control words that are compatible with RTF 1.0 (Word 6.0/Word 95). The files do not use any RTF 1.8 or 1.9 extensions, which keeps compatibility as broad as possible while still supporting all the formatting features the templates demonstrate.