Microsoft's 1987 plain-text-plus-formatting format — still the one nearly every word processor and text editor can open without a plugin.
RTF (Rich Text Format) is a document format Microsoft published in 1987 to solve a narrower problem than DOCX does: a way to store basic formatting — bold, italics, fonts, alignment — using only plain ASCII text, readable by essentially any text-processing software without a dedicated parser for a binary or ZIP-based structure. That simplicity is exactly why RTF has stayed relevant for decades despite looking dated next to DOCX: a huge range of software, including very old or minimal text editors, can open and write RTF without additional libraries, which makes it a reliable interchange format when the receiving software is unknown or old. It cannot match DOCX for complex formatting, embedded objects, or tracked changes, so anyone building a genuinely complex document still reaches for Word. For a simple formatted document — a letter, a short report, a form — that needs to move between very different pieces of software reliably, RTF often just works where a DOCX file would not.
iPhone and Mac open RTF in Pages, TextEdit, and the Files app preview. Windows WordPad and virtually every word processor on any platform read it natively, since RTF was specifically designed to need minimal software support.
RTF is more universally readable than DOCX, but eventually a document needs a fixed, non-editable layout to send out, or the richer formatting DOCX supports for something more complex. Filemorph converts either direction on-device.
Filemorph can convert RTF to PDF on-device — a fixed layout ready to send once a formatted document is finished.
Filemorph converts .rtf files entirely on-device on iPhone, iPad and Mac — no upload, no account, and it works in Airplane Mode.
Relevant operations in Filemorph:
RTF trades DOCX's richer formatting for something more universal: a plain-text structure that essentially any word processor, including decades-old or minimal ones, can read without a dedicated parser. That makes it a reliable fallback when you don't know what software will open the file.
Yes. Filemorph converts RTF to DOCX entirely on the iPhone, along with converting RTF to PDF or building an RTF file from plain text.
Yes. Filemorph converts RTF files entirely on-device — a letter or report is never uploaded anywhere, and the conversion works the same with no internet connection.