The Rich Text Format has been developed by Microsoft for the exchange of text documents between different programs and systems. It is the standard format of the word processing program Microsoft WordPad.

RTF is based on markup language. It is a fairly well supported and accessible file format, but the popularity of the format has declined due to increasing use of XML-based file formats for text documents. In addition, PDF/A for long-term archiving is better suited for text documents than RTF.

RTF is a non-preferred format for the Text documents file type.