Rich-text format

A text formatting standard established by Microsoft Corporation to enable text to be transferred between a word processor and other software without losing all of its formatting properties. Many modern word processors have the option of saving documents in rich-text format (RTF). Increasingly, authoring software vendors of hypertext, hypermedia, and CMS software are adding RTF importing utilities to overcome the frustrations of importing in ASCII or ANSI forms that lose all or most formatting properties. (See also ASCII and ANSI)