Rich Text Format Directory

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Rich Text Format Directory

Filename extension	.rtfd
Uniform Type Identifier	com.apple.rtfd
Type of format	Word processing document
Container for	RTF and media files

Rich Text Format Directory, also known as RTFD (due to its extension, .rtfd), is a primary document format of TextEdit, an application native to NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X which has also been ported to other versions of Unix. The file format is based on the Rich Text Format, but can also include "attachments" such as images. An RTFD file is a bundle, a folder containing files. It contains a Rich Text file called TXT.rtf that contains Rich Text formatting commands, as well as commands for including images or other attachments contained within the bundle. Images used in the document are stored in the bundle in their native formats.

In contrast to RTF, RTFD files cannot be opened by applications on Windows or other non Mac OS X operating systems, as bundles currently only are supported on Mac OS X.

One big advantage with RTFD is that it supports scalable high quality image formats like PDF, so an RTFD file can print with no information loss at large paper sizes. RTF does support a number of scalable image meta file formats, but they are not as versatile as PDF.^{[citation needed]}

In Microsoft Windows, RTFD files are displayed as folders. Editing these folders destroys the RTFD.^{[citation needed]} Files in this format cannot be properly viewed in Windows. This should be fixed in future versions of Microsoft Word, or may be an update for Word 2008, but the status is unknown at this time.^{[citation needed]}