The Rich Text Format (RTF) was developed by Microsoft to provide a format for text and graphics interchange that is now supported my many different applications.

We don't know a single word processing application which does not support the import and export of RTF. RTF is based on the ANSI code page - this means it does not use unicode strings, however using the \u tag it is possible to embedded unicode characters into the RTF format. Text inside the RTF data can also use a certain charset. The charset has to be set as property for the active font. It is also possible to add proprietary information. Number values simply have to follow a custom tag, such as \wpsomething123, custom stream data has to follow the \* tag and be placed into a group: {\*\mydata xxxx yyyy zzz}

Our new generation RTF reader used by WPTools 5 and TextDynamic has been completely rewritten to support as many RTF tags as it was possible and necessary. So it was possible to create a very fast reader which supports nested tables, different kinds of images (including PNG, JPEG), style sheets and optionally also footnotes.

Since the Rich Text Format is based on single byte, our .NET and ActiveX control TextDynamic can also, in addition to load and save using unicode strings (2 bytes), load and save using data in form of variant arrays of bytes.

With the product RTF2PDF we can provide a product which converts RTF to PDF using the same powerful engine (and most of its API) as used by TextDynamic. It can write RTF data and can convert RTF to HTML. Unlike TextDynamic the control RTF2PDF has been optimized to be used with ASP on the server.