Microsoft Word Is Under A Hack Attack: Do Not Open Documents Named '.RTF'

[thesquanderer]

40. I dont think RTF was designed for storage space reasons

As I recall, the issue was that, in the old days, if you wanted to send a document to someone else, and they didn't use the same word processing program you did, the only thing you could do was convert to plain text and lose all formatting. You couldn't open a Word doc unless you owned Word, etc. So for example, RTF would allow a Word user to send their document to any Mac or Windows user who didn't have Word, and they could still see a reasonably well formatted version of the document.

The RTF was basically made obsolete by three things: the ability of numerous apps to read native Word files; the fact that Word itself has become so much more ubiquitous; and the rise of PDF. Sending Word docs to people and worrying about whether or not they will be readable is not as big an issue as it used to be. The bigger issue is probably one of whether it will necessarily appear as expected, and PDF addresses that issue much better than RTF ever did.