[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by HarryT

RTF was intended to be a document interchange format, not a permanent storage format. The reason it's so big is that everything is in ASCII, all formatting is done with tags, etc. It was intended to be easy for any program to parse, for import and output.

It's perhaps not the best choice of formats to actually read in; if you convert it to any "binary" format, the size is likely to shrink drastically.

For me, that RTF is a plain text format is a reason to recommend it. One of the things I like about plain text formats like RTF, HTML, and OpenDocument Text (which is a collection of zipped XML files and folders) is that I can open them up and see everything that is in the document.